May Your Suffering End
by wenwenwrites
Summary: Natalia had just turned twelve when they call her name. (Scenes from her Quarter Quell) Clint's biggest crime was being friends with Nat.
1. May Your Suffering End

Natalia had been twelve for two days when they call her name.

The odds weren't exactly against her, but with the Quarter Quell, they were worse than usual.

"Natalia Romanova!" and then a delighted smile. "Oh, what a beautiful name! It rolls off the tongue so nicely!" Frostine croons. "Come on up here, sweetie." The girl already standing beside the painted and costumed woman has tears streaking down her face and a hitch in her breath.

The girls around her murmur and shuffle to make room, and she slips her way through the gaps until she reaches the front. Her skirt, the nicest she owns, barely ruffles in the hot breeze. She holds her head high and proud as she glides up to the stage, each footfall precise and sure.

Frostine reaches out with one bony hand once she reaches the stop of the steps and clamps onto her shoulder. Natalia lets herself be steered to her escort's side. The other girl is shuffled to the side, out of the way. "Wonderful, wonderful! My, you are a pretty one. Smile for the camera, darling!"

Obediently, Natalia pastes a small, halfhearted smile on her face. Her district stares back stonily. The girls, her fellow contenders for the Reaping, are more relaxed now, with the guilty relief that they had not been chosen. There is low, mutinous muttering – as usual, she knows, when a tribute so young is chosen – but Natalia knows there is nobody in the crowd who actually gives a damn about her in particular, and it dies away quickly.

Except one. But he is just one day shy twelve, not even eligible to volunteer. He stares mutely back at her, eyes wide in horror, at the back of the crowd.

Natalia meets his eyes, and for a split second, lets her smile soften into something genuine. For him, she vows, she will come back alive.

…

The doors open, and Natalia smiles when he bursts in, tripping over his own feet. Without hesitation, he throws himself at her, and she catches him.

"Nat," and his voice is strangled, muffled against her shoulder. "I—you can't, you can't leave me, I—you—"

"Hey," she interrupts him, soft but firm. "It'll be okay, Clint, I can do this. I'll win and come back, and we'll live in the Victor's Village. We'll have as much food as we can eat and we'll never get cold." She smooths one hand over his cowlick, and he pulls back. He's blinking away tears, trying so hard to be strong for her. Tears prick her eyes, but she wills them away.

He slips a pendant into her hand – a hand carved wooden figure on a piece of twine. "For your token," he says, unnecessarily. "Will you – will you wear it?"

She nods, closes her hand over it. "Until the end of time."

She holds his hand, the rest of the time they have left, and he leans his forehead on her shoulder, and she on his in silence. She lets his breathing soothe her, fill her up, give her strength, then lifts her head to memorize the lines of his face – just in case this is the last time –

No, she can't afford to think that.

In the end, the Peacekeepers drag him out. "You have to live!" he yells to her, his calm placidity evaporating into panic. "You need to win, Nat, promise – !" and the doors close behind him.

Natalia stands tall, hands at her side. "I promise," she breathes to an empty room.

Natalia has no family left in the world. She hadn't expected the doors to open again, but they do, and she turns, mask of calm firmly in place, and the Madame strides in.

"Natalia." The Madame crosses her arms. Natalia inclines her head. The older woman purses her lips. She doesn't quite seem to know what to say. "We'll miss you, at the Red Room," is what she says finally. Natalia imagines the words would be stilted and awkward in another's mouth, but the Madame is far too disciplined for that.

"Thank you," Natalia replies. "Give everyone my love."

There is nothing, really, to say. The Madame nods once, sharply, and turns to go, but pauses. "You're a survivor," she says. A last farewell. And then she is gone.

Natalia stands in silence until the Peacekeepers come for her.

…

Nick Fury is a bit of a legend in all of Panem, but especially District 10.

He is the first and only victor from their District. He also killed all four the four Careers left in the top five with him in an ambush and pitched battle, his only kills of the entire Game.

Natasha sits with poise, a serene mask on her face even as she puzzles out the fancy silverware, and eyes him discreetly over the potatoes and buttered bread rolls on her plate.

He stares straight back at her through his one uncovered eye, unaffected.

At the end of the table, Frostine twitters like a bird, excitement over the Reaping warring with thinly veiled disgust at her tablemates' manners on her ostentatiously decorated face. Beside her, Jessica who had been crying on the stage pokes at the food on her plate and does not eat. The two boys, one visibly angry and the other with trembling hands, wolf down the potatoes and steak ravenously – the former with his hands, the latter with only a fork. None of her fellow tributes speak.

One mentor for four of them. Natalia will need to keep Fury's attention on her if she wants to survive.

She slices through the meat delicately, and it is tender enough to melt on her tongue. The table is too tall for her to eat comfortably, and her feet swing just a few centimeters shy of the floor.

"Listen up," says Fury, his voice gruff, and launches into a long lecture about the Games, the Capitol, and their training. Natalia absorbs every word like a sponge. Jessica descends increasingly into despair as he continues, and Trembling Hands looks like he's going to be sick.

"Why do we have to suck up to them?" Angry interrupts when Fury tells them to make friendly with the audience and stylists. "They're all going to watch us die and laugh." He's seventeen, the oldest of the tributes, and judging by the callouses on his hands, probably works in the slaughterhouses. Worked. He tosses a half-eaten bread roll onto his plate mutinously and wipes his hands on his pants. Frostine leans away from him slightly, the blue gemstones embedded around her eyes twinkling in the light as she crinkles her face in distaste.

"Don't interrupt me, boy," Fury glowers. Angry scowls down at his plate. "Sponsors will make or break your Games. You run out of food or get an infection, you're going to wish you made nice with the Capitol folks. So you let them pretty you up, they want to make you a damn peacock you let them. They say jump, you ask how high. Am I clear?" The older man sweeps them all with a glare.

"Yes, sir," says Natalia, and the others echo her, reluctantly. Fury's eye comes to rest on her, and she smiles beatifically.

Fury grunts approvingly, apparently satisfied with their response. "Let's talk schedules."

Once they finish eating, they watch the Reapings. Natalia memorizes all their names, their mannerisms, studies their bodies and postures and movements. She gives them nicknames. It'll make it easier for her to kill them in the arena.

As for the past 24 years, the tributes from Districts 1, 2, and 4 are exceptionally strong. The first girl from District 2 who volunteers, a tall, lithe blonde with a razor sharp smile, lingers in her mind. Natalia would bet everything she owned that this girl will make it to the top five.

Natalia notes the ones that cry, the undernourished, the faint of heart. She catalogues the ones with fire in their eyes, lean muscle under taut skin.

The others are staring at the screen almost blankly. Jessica is on the verge of tears again, Angry is scowling at the wall, and Trembling Hands looks like he might pass out. They've given up hope. It takes a lot to survive in an outer District like 10, but it takes more to survive life as a killer. They'll fight when the time comes, but they don't have the fortitude to last. Not like Natalia.

After all, Natalia is a survivor.

…

Natalia doesn't have to be the one to request individual rather than group training. Angry does that for her.

Good. She doesn't need her fellow District tributes' suspicions on her.

When they are all sleeping, in their individual rooms on the train, she slips out and stands in front of the door to his compartment. She smooths down her jean skirt, then knocks twice and stands back, hands clasped behind her back.

Fury is still dressed in all black, leather trenchcoat and eyepatch both firmly in place. He looks down at her and raises his eyebrow. "Yes?"

Natalia stares back boldly, shoulders back and chin up. "Teach me how to win," she says.

He smiles. It's not a friendly one.

Natalia doesn't care.

…

"Oh, what an absolute doll you are!"

Natalia stands absolutely naked as a trio of color-coordinated but outrageously modified (actual feathers sprouting from their heads and shoulders) woodpeckers circle her critically, armed with scrubbing sponges and tweezers.

"But your skin!" one bemoans dramatically, snatching Natalia's wrist up and staring at her forearm. "What a tragedy! Oh, how do you stand it?"

Natalia resists the urge to snatch her hand back, or worse, punch him in the face. "It really is quite difficult," she says instead, widening her eyes mournfully.

The prep team buys it unquestioningly, cooing at her sympathetically.

"You poor dear," one trills. Her brilliant orange plumage is contrasted by swirling blue inked in a mask around her eyes. Natalia thinks her name starts with a P.

"Don't you worry," another promises earnestly, clucking woefully at her shoulder-length hair. "We'll fix you right up!"

Natalia beams winningly at them, and watches them fall for her all over again.

Her stylist is relatively new and desperately trying to fit in. Unfortunately, the blue honeycomb inked over every inch of his skin comes off as garish, and the indigo and purple rhinestones in stripes along his cheeks do him no favors. His fingernails are covered by silver rhinestones and flash when he gestures wildly.

He's harried, eyes jumping all over. He is Jessica's stylist too, because there weren't enough to give every District four. Their prep team is also shared.

"And we could do a, a, cow style!" he rambles. "Make you a cow warrior! I'll get you some, some leathers. Black and white leathers. Make you look strong. Cow warrior chief! Nice big headdress, you'll look darling! Absolutely fierce!"

Natalia doesn't want to look like a cow. She doesn't want to look strong, and she certainly doesn't want to look fierce. She widens her eyes pleadingly, tilts her head to the side. "Mr. Nimmo, sir," she interrupts. "Can I be an angel?"

The stylist pauses, mouth gaping. He's leaning towards outrage. He also has final authority on her parade costume, so Natalia has to sell her pitch fast.

Natalia lowers her head. "I'm sorry," she mumbles, reaching up to scrub the tears welling up in her eyes. Nimmo makes noises of distress and pulls her wrist away gently, admonishing her not to smear her makeup. "I just – my mommy told me stories about the angels that help me watch over the sheep. She said they're the prettiest creatures in the world!" She looks up at Nimmo through her lashes. "I always wanted to wear a pretty dress and be an angel. And you're really good at making people pretty. Can you – can you make me a sheep angel?" She bites her lip, twists her hands demurely in front of her.

He hems and haws, but Natalia knows she's won. She can see the gears turning in his head with the ideas she's planted. "I'll see what I can do," the stylist says, pursing his lips. "You've been such a good girl after all – the team loves you! Not like that other girl, keeps fighting back. She threw Balthar's comb clean across the room! What a barbarian! My word." And he leaves the room muttering. Natalia smiles.

Her dress is exactly as she wanted it. Pure white and with textured whorls made of something Nimmo calls "quilting dacron", it falls to her knees, where it's trimmed by a thick, almost raw wool. The sleeves are cut off at the shoulder and fall down her back in two coattails – her wings. Her halo is a circlet of wool, resting atop her hair and liberal extensions make her red curls fall halfway down her back. Nimmo hands her a pair of gloves, black satin trimmed with wool, and a puffy pair of matching boots. The prep team – Natalia calls them P, Q, and R in her head – stencil silvery designs all over her face and bare arms.

They stand back when they're done, the four Capitol woodpeckers, and PQR practically faint from excitement as Nimmo turns her to the mirror.

She doesn't recognize herself, with alabaster skin sparkling silver and hair like fire. The girl in pure white that stares back from the mirror isn't the shepherd girl from the Red Room in the livestock District. Natalia hates herself for it, but she likes it.

She wants to rip it off, throw away this visage that makes her like what the Capitol has done to her to make her its own. But she has to play the game. She knows what she has to do.

She beams, lets a radiant smile split her face, and throws her arms around Nimmo's waist in a hug. "Thank you, Mr. Nimmo," she breathes, willing tears to well up in her eyes, and "it's beautiful," and though he pries her off, gently, so she doesn't ruin her makeup, he is smiling too – wide and pleased and grateful that this little girl from the barbarian district appreciates his work. She hugs PQR each in turn too, and they aww and fuss over her until it's time to go.

While the last-minute costume change might have been good for her, it seems to have been rather unfortunate for her chariot partner. Trembling Hands looks extremely uncomfortable in his high-collared, wool-lined tuxedo made of the same material as her dress. He doesn't have a halo, but he is holding a shepherd's crook awkwardly in one hand. His pants are the same light material, tucked into boots like hers, and he rubs frantically under his collar. Jessica and Angry have been handed down the cow warrior look, and Natalia thinks they pull it off as well as can be expected. The cow-print vests are atrocious but show off Angry's triceps and biceps quite well, though she thinks the steer-horn headdress is a bit much.

The room is almost bursting, with twice as many chariots, horses, and tributes as previous years. Natalia wonders if they'd modified the waiting area to accommodate this many, or if they hadn't bothered and simply squished everyone into the original. She bets on the latter.

Stylists and prep teams scurry back and forth, shrieking in panic or excitement as they rush their final touches. Most of the other tributes look rather shellshocked, huddled with the others from their District and murmuring quietly or struck mute. The Careers have formed a sort of mega-group, laughing raucously and conversing with easy grace. Every so often, one sweeps their gaze over the rest of the tributes, rooted stiffly in place, and turns back to the group with a satisfied smirk. It's raw intimidation, and it's working.

Natalia is not very afraid. She is already planning ways to take them apart. Clint's pendant hangs about her neck, out in the open despite her stylist's displeased objections; one devastated expression on Natalia's face made him relent reluctantly.

She is not nervous during the chariot ride, unlike Trembling Hands who is stiff as a board and forgets how to smile. She beams and waves shyly at the audience, who scream and cheer and throw flowers at her. She is darling, she knows, the youngest of the tributes here, and she plays it up as best she can.

She is not the most stunning – Girl 2A takes that with a daring silver sheathe dress and gladiator heels, or Boy 4A who is stripped to the waist but pulls it off well with a chiseled chest and abs and stunning blue eyes. Girl 7A is naturally gorgeous, but her stylist has flubbed it by turning her into a pine tree that masks her body's curves. The older girl from 12 actually does quite well this year by the audience's roars, baggy miner's pants tucked into boots and nothing on top but a black bandeau and smears of coal dust.

Natalia doesn't bother to listen to the President's speech. This is her first chance to observe her competitors in person, so she watches them instead. They're watching her too, she knows, so she blinks back with wide eyes, always breaks eye contact first, and fidgets with her hands. She sees them dismissing her as a threat – Girl 4B's mouth tips in a scornful sneer – and she smiles inside.

…

That night, when they're all in their rooms with their massive beds and fake windows, she slips out and pads to Fury's room. She takes the knives he gives her and they spar until her muscles give out. When she's lying on the floor, gasping for air, he begins his lecture.

…

Most of the others are at combat-related stations, desperately handling spears and swords and knives for the first time so they can go down fighting. The Careers are there too, casually intimidating the rest with their ease and familiarity with the weapons. Natalia isn't about to show off her weapons skills in front of 47 competitors, so she heads straight for the traps station, where she picks up snare after pitfall with ease.

She plays shy, doesn't talk to anyone first. Nobody talks to her until lunch, when she's sitting alone and methodically clearing the food from her tray.

"Hi." Natalia looks up, and Girl 11A sets down her tray. Natalia gives her a small, unsure smile. "I'm Dana," Girl 11A says.

"Natalia," she responds in a mumble, dropping her eyes back down to her tray. Girl 11A is slight of build, and even with the faint cord of muscle shifting beneath her skin, Natalia knows she is one of the weaker ones. She will be picked off early, especially with such a large field. An early death was usually quicker, cleaner; Girl 11A would be lucky for that, Natalia notes dispassionately.

Girl 11A sticks around after lunch, when Natalia moves on to the edibles station, and is in fact joined by Girls 11B, 6A and B, and Boys 6B and 7A. They're the leftovers, those so hopeless that nobody else will ally with them, drawn instinctively to others of their ilk. Herd mentality. They're the deer, the sardines, forming a group so each has a slightly better chance of survival. They talk amongst each other, stilted conversation that smooths as the afternoon stretches on.

Natalia doesn't say much, but frightened doe-eyes and murmured questions "is this how you do it?" "am I doing this right?" "can you help me?" have their protective older sibling instincts flaring, and they collect her into their group, a little unfortunate girl to help and guard. They want to take care of her, and she capitalizes on it ruthlessly. Remorse has no business in the Games.

She shrinks back when a Career tribute stalks past, wearing confidence and arrogance like cloaks, and Boy 6B puts a comforting hand on her shoulder as Girl 6A steps in front of her defensively. Girl 1B notices, smirks predatorily, and winks as she saunters past. Boy 7A practically growls when she's gone, and the girls from 11 have lips pressed together and eyebrows furrowed. Natalia lets a single tear slip down her face, catches the others' attention when she lifts a hand to wipe it away, and makes a show of acting brave by fighting down her tears. She has them wrapped around her little finger, and the part of her that hates it weakens and weakens.

At night, after dinner, she knocks on Fury's door.

…

Knives at night. Fury feeds her everything she needs to know about the games.

Training by day. Natalia builds her persona and hits every single non-combat station available.

She watches the other tributes, builds her mental profiles. She notes the ones who are holding back, the ones with false bravado. She constructs plans to take them out. Her herd adds Girl 8A, bringing them up to eight strong.

Natalia doesn't want a high training score. That would bring her persona crashing down. When the doors open to let her in, she trots to the center of the floor. The Gamemakers are not paying much attention. That's okay.

She dances. Madame taught all the girls ballet, and in her bland training uniform, she twirls and patters across the floor, leaps and hops through the air. She tiptoes delicately forward, bends her knees, spins to the music in her head.

The Gamemakers are thoroughly unimpressed. Natalia resists the urge to laugh. Instead, she beams angelically upwards at them when she is dismissed and drops into a curtsy before skipping lightly out.

Girl 2A scores an 11, the highest of all. The rest of the Careers range from 8 to 10. Her alliance members mostly get 4s and 5s, but Boy 7A manages a 7. Angry gets an 8, but rather than pleased, his glower darkens. Natalia receives a 3.

Fury's scrutiny is calculating. Her fellow District 10 tributes are caught between scorn, relief, and concern. Natalia makes herself look devastated.

Too easy.

…

Her interview dress, after careful word placement around Nimmo, is a shimmery parody of a shepherd girl's frock, overlaid with a snowy shawl, braided leather circlet, and knee-high gladiator sandals.

She sits demurely. There are almost forty interviews between the first and her. Does the Capitol audience get bored? The first few tributes start off strong, of course. They're always crowd favorites. Girl 2A plays flirtatious and deadly by turns. The audience loves it – danger, after all, is quite seductive. By District 7 the crowd is bored, by 9, restless. When Natalia walks on stage, the applause is polite but not enthusiastic.

"Natalia Romanova," Caesar smiles. "Twelve years old! Aren't you just adorable?"

Natalia twists her hands in her lap and ducks her head. "Thank you, sir," she says shyly.

Several people in the audience aww. Caesar turns up the brightness of his smile. "Oh, just call me Caesar!" he invites. "We're all friends, aren't we?" he asks the audience, who dutifully responds with a cheer. "Tell me, Natalia, how are you liking the Capitol."

Natalia smiles. "It's amazing!" she gushes. "Everything is so bright, and, and clean! Everyone has been so nice – and everyone I met is so pretty!" she adds, then covers her mouth and blushes, as if she can't believe she'd said such a thing out loud.

Caesar laughs heartily, leaning in to touch her shoulder companionably. The audience members preen. "You're looking quite pretty yourself, young lady," he winks, and the crowd murmurs agreement.

"Oh, it's because of my stylist, Mr. Nimmo," Natalia replies demurely. "He's magic!"

A ripple of laughter and smiles passes through the audience. The camera projects Nimmo's face, looking surprised, pleased, and bashful. Caesar smiles indulgently. "He certainly has outdone himself this year." He leans forward. "Tell me, Natalia," he says confidentially. "What's it like being mentored by a legend?"

The camera pans over to Nick Fury, in his black leathers and an intimidating scowl pasted on his face.

Natalia hesitates just a moment, and blurts, "He's scary," and then immediately buries her face in her hands again. The crowd laughs again. She can tell they're swaying to her side, hanging onto her words – an adorable little girl, drawn to her innocence and naivety, as Caesar coaxes her to show her blushing face again. Maybe it won't be enough for sponsors, but surely the tributes are buying her cover as well.

"Do you have anyone waiting back at home for you?" Caesar prompts.

Natalia knew the question was coming, but it catches her off guard nonetheless. She pauses, and the devastation that creeps onto her face is real. The crowd murmurs sympathetically, and the buzzer goes off.

"Best of luck to you, Natalia Romanova of District 10. May the odds be ever in your favor," Caesar finishes quietly, and the applause continues long after she's left the stage.

…

Natalia sleeps well, her night dreamless. Her anticipation is ruthlessly crushed down, her nervousness and sense of impending doom both compartmentalized with cold efficiency. She is serene when she wakes, and she is ready to go when they come for her.

Jessica is near tears yet again but trying to hide it. Trembling Hands is living up to his nickname, and his face is deathly pale. Angry looks like he might be sick. Natalia pulls a shell-shocked expression on her face.

…

Fury claps her shoulder, looks her dead in the eye, and commands, "Win."

…

The uniform is light but waterproof, thin mottled pants, black T-shirt, thin camo jacket. Boots.

…

Natalia wraps Clint's pendant around her bicep, tight enough that it can't be used as a handhold, loose enough for blood circulation.

…

The glass tube slides open. Natalia steps in.

…

Natalia breathes in the humid air as the tube retracts, sharp eyes taking in every detail. Towering trees, thick undergrowth, leaves and vines everywhere: jungle. She can work with this.

There are packs scattered all around, some a tantalizing five meters away, and growing in value to the cornucopia. Boy 4B stands on the plate closest to her on the right, and he stares right at her with a predatory leer. Natalia lets herself flinch and look away. Girl 9A is on her right – strong build but little technique in terms of weaponry.

Natalia breathes. The count reaches zero.

The horn sounds, and Natalia launches herself off her plate. She hightails it into the jungle without grabbing a single thing and doesn't stop her light-footed sprint until she judges she's a good distance from the cornucopia. She stalks through the trees and drops down onto the roots of a large tree, carefully regulating her breathing.

She doubts she was followed, but better safe than sorry. She holds herself very still, straining her eyes and ears as she peers around the trunk. Nothing. Nobody in sight, nothing to break the oppressive silence that Natalia's mind screams is just not right. Too busy at the cornucopia to pursue one little girl who is easy prey anyways.

Nick Fury's rules of survival, number one: don't get caught up in the bloodbath. Check.

For all that she spent her week of training building up camaraderie with her herd, Natalia has no intention of seeking them out. Not immediately, anyways. Natalia will work well enough alone.

For now, Natalia needs to get access to supplies: food, water, weapons, shelter.

She leaves the relative security of her tree and makes her way onwards. She needs to prepare to go on the offensive. Although she hadn't joined in the bloodbath, she also doesn't have any supplies. She couldn't safely drink water even if she found some, because she doesn't have a water purification kit.

She does find water. A river, wending its way among the trees. Natalia walks lightly so that when she checks, she doesn't leave footprints. She retreats back a few meters, scales a tree with sure, easy movements. The tree trunks are wide and slick when not covered by moss, the actual branches far above her head, but vines drop from branches to the ground. She pulls herself up hand over hand up a vine, keeps climbing until she's all but concealed in a tangle of leaves and vines and shadows. The heat is sweltering; she's sweating under the jacket, but she's reluctant to take it off. She knows this is the type of climate the mosquitoes thrive in, and although probably not fatal, she'd rather not have to deal with the irritation of their bites. She can endure. She pulls up her hood to conceal her hair and settles in to wait.

A few minutes later, the cannons begin. Twelve in total; thirty-six left to play. It's a disappointment. Natalia had hoped the bloodbath would take out more – perhaps the presence of a larger Career pack sent would-be scavengers running when they otherwise might have tried for a prize. That would be bad news for Natalia as well. Less stragglers with backpacks means less potential prey for her with the purification tablets she needed most.

She lets herself doze. She was hidden well enough, and secure enough in the boughs of the tree. She knows she could never truly sleep in this arena, and she had never fallen out of a tree while asleep in the past.

It's a gamble to sleep in the daytime, more so on the first day. But she's betting that the other tributes will be too preoccupied staying alive and getting away than deliberately hunting down the others. And if the Careers do as they've traditionally done, they'll be setting up a defense perimeter and base camp around the cornucopia today.

She's startled awake twice by the boom a cannon. Each time, she remains motionless, holding her breathe, until she determines it safe to sleep again.

She comes awake some time later when foliage rustles unnaturally somewhere below her perch. Natalia isn't sure how long she slept. A good number of hours, probably. She's always been good at sleeping at will. She can't see the sun; only in the Cornucopia clearing was it clearly visible. Otherwise, the thick foliage of the jungle blocks most of her view of the sky. She'd have to climb much higher to see the sky. She leans down carefully to check. It's a deer – a welcome sight. At least, until it turns and she sees a second, deformed head protruding from its neck. She freezes, and stares as the creature bounds away leisurely. What the hell? Then: can I still eat it?

While she's contemplating this, she hears a different kind of rustle. Human footfalls.

She stays still and silent, but coils her muscles in preparation for fight or flight.

Natalia recognizes him. Boy 5B. He's gasping, out of breath. He's made no attempt to hide his tracks, and his jacket is tied around his waist. Her sharp eyes track a small bulge in his jacket pocket. The purification tablets? But he falls on the river and drinks directly from the source. Natalia grimaces – whatever he grabbed probably wasn't the tablets. She doesn't make a move as he rises, stumbles across the river – he's in up to his chest – and disappears back into the jungle.

Natalia doesn't plan to move for a long while. She stretches each limb in turn, tensing and relaxing muscles bit by bit to keep herself warmed up. As she watches, a snake with a girth the size of her neck slips through the undergrowth on the opposite side of the stream. A small, spotted, catlike creature crouches to lap at the water's edge. Neither has an extra head.

The light begins to fade. Natalia doesn't move for hours. She is patient. Impatience gets you killed, Fury's voice growls in her mind.

Dusk. Natalia climbs precariously high until she has a good view of the sky as the sun slips away and takes the last moment of the arena's illumination to do some scouting. She sees a circular break in the distance back the way she came from – the cornucopia's clearing. Everything else seems to be unbroken forest, dominated by the same unfamiliar tree as the one she's perched in. A mist hanging low over the trees obscures the horizon; she can't see if or where the trees end. She twists around: the land rises there in mountains, maybe. She can't see the peaks, but she keeps trying until darkness falls completely.

The anthem makes her start, then cling to her tree as its tip sways precariously.

Faces appear in the sky: Girl 1B is first. A boy from District 3, then another Career – one of the boys from District 4. One girl and one boy from Five. Girls 6A and 8A from the Herd. Boy 8B. Jessica and Trembling Hands. The boy from 11 who received an 8. The thirteen-year-old girl from Twelve. Districts 2 and 7 are the only ones entirely unscathed – 2 because of the obvious, but 7 is a surprise. A credit to their mentor, perhaps.

Natalia does not have time for emotion. She forces it away into her mind, and what's left is the lingering thought that their ends had probably been fast. One last mercy.

The night fades back to black, and the unnatural silence returns to the arena. It's only then that Natalia realizes why her mind thinks it's so wrong. Jungle like this, there should be some kind of bird. The woods back in 10 always had some kind of singing birds, like mockingjays – where there are trees, there are birds to take advantage of them. But here she has yet to see a single bird.

It doesn't have to mean anything. For all Natalia knows, the other districts might not even have birds. So Natalia files away the information for later consideration.

Carefully, keeping close to the trunk of the tree to keep the branches from rustling, she lowers herself down to the branches, then wraps her sleeves around her hands and slides down a vine until she reaches the forest floor. She was expecting it to be completely black, but there's an unearthly glow in patches, either on the ground, scattered on rocks, or the trees themselves.

It's moss, she discovers, when she approaches cautiously to take a closer look. One patch by itself is not enough light to see more than a couple feet in any direction if she strains her eyes, but the whole forest is covered by the stuff. It throws the trees into dramatic shadows – plenty of hiding places for someone like Natalia, but probably still dark enough that the other tributes will want to hunker down and hide out the night.

Prime time for Natalia to begin her hunt. She slips through the trees, keeping the river on her right, and goes to find a victim. Easier said than done.

If Natalia were the other tributes, she would be sleeping up high in a tree, where nobody could see her. Possibly with some sort of ranged weapon to pick off people like Natalia.

But very few other tributes had bothered visiting the rope climbing station during training, and even fewer made it higher than ten or fifteen feet. The lowest branches of these massive trees are at least thirty. There are other kinds of tree, sure, but thin and whippy. They wouldn't be able to support Natalia's weight, and she's pretty sure she weighs somewhere around five or ten pounds less than the next smallest tribute. Natalia predicts they'll be bedded down in the undergrowth, huddling like fawns in hopes of escaping detection.

She doesn't rush. That would be careless, and carelessness kills here as surely as starvation.

She steps slow and careful, taking care not to break the branches from the brush. Creeping movements will hide her better if there is someone watching, although she cannot cover as much ground.

She keeps going the same direction for what feels like an hour, hour and a half. She doubles back on her tracks, breaks to the right or left every so often and conceals herself in the shadows and waits ten minutes or so before continuing. Despite her little side trips, she follows the river diligently, and every so often goes out of her way to make sure it is still on her right.

It's something of a haphazard search pattern, with her irregular zigzagging, but very slow going. The river stays wide each time she checks on it, but she doesn't know if it's getting deeper, though she suspects it is. The currents have slowed, a lazy meander here instead of a headlong rush.

She's paranoid. How could she not be? Her heart beats steady, but a little faster than normal. She freezes at the slightest noise and her eyes dart from shadow to shadow until she finds the culprit – a small mammal scurrying across the ground or in the bush, a snake slithering the length of a tree trunk. She still hasn't found another tribute, and she entertains the possibility that she's been wandering right past them, hidden in the boughs of the great trees or among their roots.

Half a mile later, Natalia freezes, holds her breath. She strains her ears, and the sound comes again: the quiet, huffed exhale of someone who is sleeping lightly.

He's well hidden, but it's his face that gives him away. Pale and drawn, his face glows in the eerie lighting of the moss that pillows his head, and it catches Natalia's eyes despite the leafy branches of a bush that he'd drawn over himself.

Natalia is cautious. Starting from five meters away, she conducts a spiraling patrol of the surrounding area, glaring up into the gloom of the trees, just in case this Boy 3A is not alone and his partner is keeping watch nearby. Her search turns up empty. There's nobody else in the vicinity.

Either way, she needs to make her move fast. The longer she waits, the more likely he'll wake up or someone or something else will find one or both of them.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, she knows exactly what she has to do.

She doesn't know what supplies, if any, he has. Simple thievery won't be enough – she'll have to kill him.

A small part of Natalia is screaming, horrified, telling her this is wrong, she can't go around killing people, especially when she has other options, it's sick, it's messed up. Natalia crushes it down, discards it. It's surprisingly easy. There is no room for hesitation or morals in the Games. She's a survivor. If that means she has to be a killer, then she'll kill.

She stalks him like a predator, soundless, her small frame coiled to half her height.

He doesn't wake up until her arm's around his neck and she _pulls_.

She drags him up against her, shoves at the back of his head with her other arm as he flails. Something hits her in the arm, badly aimed and without strength. She yanks his head to the side, and he drops it. His struggles are sluggish, probably still half asleep, and his hands, twice the size of hers, claw at her arm weakly. He stills in her arms, goes limp. She keeps holding on, almost a minute, she thinks. Then she drops him and scrabbles to grab everything he owns. There's the knife he hit her with, that he hadn't had the time or foresight or presence of mind to properly stab her with. She strips him of his jacket, then his shirt. There's something bulky in the pocket of the jacket, but she doesn't stop to check it. The struggle might have been relatively quiet, but she won't run the risk of discovery by staying in the area.

Once she's done, she wiggles backward, casts a quick glance in every direction. She sees nothing, hears nothing. Natalia picks up the knife. She makes herself move forward seamlessly before she can hesitate or change her mind. She draws a crimson smile in his throat.

The cannon startles her – caught up in her mind during her first murder, she'd completely forgotten about the cannon. She wipes her knife clean on his pants, slips it into the pocket on her right pants leg. Everything else gets bundled into her new extra jacket, which she winds tightly around her midsection. She leaves Boy 3A in the loam and slips onward. Her hands aren't even shaking.

A small, disgusted voice tells her there's something wrong with her. She ignores it.

She moves a little faster, puts some distance between herself and the kill site. Once she determines she's far enough, she does another spiral check, chooses a tree, and hauls herself up by the vines. The muscles in her arm have a fine tremble when she reaches the lowest branch, but she keeps climbing up through the branches to a large fork before she allows herself to stop. Carefully, so she doesn't drop anything, she unwraps Boy 3A's jacket. She sets the t-shirt aside in favor of figuring out exactly what he'd picked up from the Cornucopia.

It's a small backpack, one strap. A fanny pack, really. Inside, there's another knife, smaller, but with the same sleek edge serrated about an inch closest to the hilt. A small bottle of chlorine tablets. A floppy black parody of a water skin. Beef jerky wrapped in plastic.

Something gleams at her from the darkness, distracting her perusal of the supply pack. Natalia freezes, stares intently into the gloom. Unfortunately, the eyes that glow back at her are all too familiar.

Back in 10, she and Clint had been responsible for guarding the Red Room's sheep for a couple weeks at a time. Most of the danger had come from hawks or coyotes preying on their lambs, but every so often, a mountain lion would try to drag a sheep away. At night, she would see it watching her from the treeline as she clutched her staff, its eyes reflecting the light.

With a sinking heart, she realizes that the puma in the next tree must be even bigger than the ones she faced at home. Its eyes are set further apart, and she thinks she can make out the outline of a broad muzzle.

Without breaking eye contact, Natalia reaches into her pocket and draws the knife. Her mind throws panicked suggestions at her – run, throw the knife, climb higher, run, kill it – but none of those will do any good against a predator that can climb and run faster than her, and if she throws her knife and misses, she'll only have the shorter blade left.

The creature blinks, languidly, and the eyes disappear as it turns. Natalia hears the brush of fur against bark, the scratch of claws, and a muted thump far below. In the glow of the moss, her eyes catch the strangely mottled body wind its way into the shadows.

Natalia doesn't move, staring desperately into the darkness below her tree, until she realizes that she can see more than just shadowy outlines. Light is starting to filter in from the treetops.

She releases her white-knuckled grip on her knife and runs a hand through her hair, shaken. Once she's regained most of her composure, she turns to her supplies. She needs to be ready to move quickly – if the Careers don't come hunting, the Gamemakers will probably herd her towards them.

She cuts up Boy 3A's shirt, and the bottom and sleeves of his jacket to make coverings for her head and hands. Once her hands are wrapped, she allows herself a piece of beef, then another before she forces herself to stop. Both knives go in her pockets. Everything else she stuffs back into the pack and straps it around her waist.

Even prepared, she's reluctant to leave the relative security of her tree. Although she knows she'd be more or less trapped if she were to be spotted, being on the ground somehow feels more vulnerable.

She dithers.

It might have saved her, because a large group of footsteps tramps into the edge of her awareness. She freezes, resists the instinct to bolt. She shrinks back against the trunk of the tree, and watches between the gaps of the leaves as the tributes approach.

It's not the Careers, but it's a large group – Natalia reckons it's the biggest coalition outside the Careers, maybe ever given that the pool of candidates is twice as large this year. They all look hardened, carry themselves in a way that knows survival. They're the strongest of the non-Career tributes, and Natalia watched them enough during training to know who's in this alliance. There's the tall, muscled boy from 11, both girls from 7 who move with an easy grace through the trees, the boy from 6 who's not in her herd. Boy 9A and Girl 9B. With the death of both girls from District 5 in the bloodbath, that must mean Boy 7B and Boy 12A are probably guarding their camp.

"Hey, there's water!" one of the boys calls. The boy from 6 runs forward, towards the river.

The others follow, cautiously. 6 is careful enough to give the water a cursory check before he jumps in, cautiously followed by Girl 9B, who splashes in up to her waist. Her district partner gets to work immediately filling water bottles, while Girl 7A turns to keep watch.

"Hey, you should probably be more careful," admonishes Girl 7B, giving the water a more suspicious glare. "You never know what they'll stick in those."

Boy 6A makes a face but wades back towards the bank. Girl 9B is halfway out when he screams and disappears under a mound of wriggling silver.

"Get out!" Girl 7A yells, rushing to grab Girl 9B's arm. Boy 9A grabs her under her arms and helps haul her onto the riverbank. Her teeth are gritted but she doesn't scream despite the two fish attached to her calves by long, needle-like teeth.

"Garvin!" calls Girl 7B, desperately. "Hold on!"

Boy 11B extends his spear out over the water, and a flailing hand emerges from the mass of fish to grab it. 11B hauls him out bodily, but it's too late.

In the seconds before his hand slips off the spear, Natalia catches a glimpse of his torso, eaten away until his ribcage shines white, between the wriggling bodies of the fish. His body slips back into water that boils red, and 11 jerks back the spear. Natalia flinches. Girl 7B muffles a shriek. In the distance, his cannon booms.

The alliance leaves quickly back the way they can, subdued. Natalia counts thirty minutes before she dares to slide down.

The river is serene once again, but Natalia walks a good way upstream before she decides the water should be safe again. She fills her water as quickly as possible, keeping an eye out for the carnivorous fish, but they don't make an appearance. The hair rises on the back of her neck and she spins, one hand on a knife, but when she stares into the trees there's nothing there. She caps the skin quickly, retreats from the banks of the river before she drops a tablet in and shoves it back into her pack.

The sensation of being watched does not vanish. If anything, it grows. Natalia cannot shake it when she doubles back, past where Boy 6A was eaten alive, and pushes further into the unknown.

She follows the river and walks straight into the barrier of the arena. She stumbles backwards, momentarily disoriented. She'd slowed down, luckily for her face, when she heard a faint buzzing noise.

She can hardly tell it's there, but for the faint ripple when she hit it.

Natalia turns back around. Staying near the river is both dangerous and convenient, but for another day at least, she'll risk it.

She's in pretty good condition. She'd discovered a tree with fruits she recognized in training, long and oblong and slightly curved with a rubbery skin that peels back from the creamy insides. She eats two right away, rips the peels apart and buries them beneath a bush. She stuffs as many as she can carry in her jacket's pockets, memorizes the spot, and moves on.

…

In the afternoon, there's another cannon. That puts them at fifteen down: there's thirty-two more tributes between her and Clint.

She can do this.

And of course that's when her stalker pounces.

She walks – no, staggers away from the encounter. She holds her arm tight to her body, ignores the pain screaming from her forearm and her shoulder.

It was the puma from before, but not quite a puma. Mottled black spots, broad muzzle, unnaturally long claws that literally flash silver, and in the split second before when she turned to face it Natalia, had realized it was a mutt.

And now she's down an arm. Her windbreaker is ripped to hell. She's sacrificed the bottom of her shirt for bandages. And she can't even eat the damned mutt.

Natalia killed a mountain lion once. She and Clint. But it had been from a distance, her throwing knives and his arrows. They'd sold its pelt, but nobody would buy the meat. It was common knowledge in District 10 – cat meat of any kind led to madness, and aside from a couple of cases every so often, nobody dared eat it no matter how desperate.

The madness could take anywhere from hours to weeks to set in. Natalia doesn't want to gamble. She leaves its body to rot or be picked apart by scavengers.

She doesn't bother washing off the blood, lets it dry on her face as a macabre sort of camouflage. The rain washes it away anyways, that night, and the red runs off her in rivulets. She's dripping red.

As though a valve had been broken, the rain doesn't stop. Not that night, not the next day, not the night after that. Natalia scales a tree and stays there. The effort she exerts to get up leaves her shaking in exhaustion and pain, and she can't muster the strength to go up and check the sky when the anthem plays. She sleeps.

She eats the fruits and some more of the dried beef.

She thinks about giving up, letting herself slip out of the tree. If she were lucky, the fall would kill her.

But she's never been lucky, has she? If she were, she wouldn't be in the worst Games ever at the youngest age possible.

She wouldn't have been orphaned. She wouldn't have been taken in by the Red Room.

But 'wouldn't-have-been's and bad luck won't get her out of this mess, so she puts them out of her head. She's alone, wounded, and vulnerable. She needs to find a buffer, some sort of camouflage. She needs to find her Herd.

…

She doesn't know where to start, but the next night, she decides to cross the river. It's a gamble – she only knows for sure that Boy 5B crossed the river because she watched him do it, back on the first day. Maybe her Herd turned back, or maybe even rendezvoused on the other side of the arena.

Crossing the river is more easily said than done. The river is swollen with the rainfall, so she swings across on a vine. It's slippery with water, and she loses her grip, crashing to the muddy riverbank on the opposite side. It jars her shoulder and knocks the wind out of her, and she lays there, stunned, blinking back tears of pain.

She drags herself up and onwards.

The rain dulls her senses, muffles her surroundings. It's hard for her to stay alert with the pain and weight of exhaustion. She has a search pattern, one that loops and doubles back so she can check for pursuers, but she can't make herself stick with it. With the rain and the mud, it takes all her concentration to step where she won't make as visible a trail; whenever her boot squelches in her mud, she has to stop and scrub it out, throw loose leaves on top to hide it. It's too tiring.

So when she reaches the part where she's supposed to double back on her trail to check for hunters, she forges ahead instead. She does do the requisite hide-and-wait, though, if only to shut up Fury's voice snarling at her carelessness in her head. She flinches when she hears noises, chattering in the trees or scuffling at ground level, but every time she checks, it's some animal – intelligent eyes in brown fur and long, thin tails up above, small snuffling mammals on the ground. She doesn't have the strength to try and hunt one.

She starts seeing signs of other tributes. Places where the bushes have been disturbed, knocking dead leaves and berries to the ground, where mud has been scrubbed over unnaturally to hide footprints. She sees another of those fruit trees, but all the lowest fruit has been plucked.

Finally, she finds a snare when the light glints off the metal wire.

She backs up, 10 meters, 50 meters, and settles down to wait. She doesn't know whose this trap is, but if she's lucky, it'll be the Herd's.

Draped in her and Boy 3A's jackets, she crouches in the bushes and smears mud over her face.

The snare catches something – medium-small, hooved, generally black in color. It squeals and scrabbles around in short bursts. Natalia watches it for hours, terrified that it'll draw another predator. Her stomach growls, and she eats the last of her beef.

Her luck holds: in the evening, two people come to check the snare, and they're from her Herd. Natalia's breath picks up. Girl 11A and Girl 6B pick their way from the forest on her right, exclaim over the creature in the trap. 6B kills it with her spear and picks it up by the nape of the neck. Girl 11A resets the snare.

They're about to leave. Natalia makes her move.

She pulls the coverings around her head down around her neck, revealing her hair, and stands. "Dana!" she calls, stumbling towards the pair. It's only half-feigned; her legs have fallen asleep while she waited in the bushes.

Both older girls whirl in surprise. Girl 6B brandishes her spear, but 11A steps forward, hope and disbelief lighting up her features. "Natalia?"

Natalia lets tears streak her muddy face as she launches herself into Girl 11A's midsection. "Dana, I was so scared – and the cat – attacked me! Hurts – couldn't find you," she mumbles, as the older girl huggs her fiercely.

"We got you, we got you now," the older girl murmurs, carding a hand through Natalia's hair.

Girl 6B pats her head and smiles at her, but it's strained.

They take her back to their camp. There are only five of them, now, because of the two who died during the bloodbath.

All of them have the signs of the hunted – perpetual frowns, jumpiness, strained conversation.

They'd found a cave – good cover, but easy to be trapped inside. Natalia follows them in anyways. Girl 11B makes distressed noises when she sees Natalia's wounds, which had scabbed over but still ooze blood, and changes her makeshift bandages.

"How did you get these?" Girl 11B asks, poking gingerly at Natalia's shoulder.

"There was a big cat," says Natalia. "Like a mountain lion, but darker. And it had spots. And really big claws."

"Leopard," Girl 6B interjects. "It's called a leopard."

Natalia nods. "I was looking for food and it jumped on me."

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Girl 6B and Boy 6B exchange glances. "How did you get away?" Boy 6B asks.

Natalia doesn't want to tell them it was her. "It hit me with its claws, but it couldn't bite me. It stepped on a snake," she says, the story forming in her head. "and…" she flinched. "The snake attacked the cat and I ran."

The two from District 6 are clearly dubious, and not even the girls from 11 are completely buying her story.

"The snake attacked the leopard?" asks Girl 6B skeptically. "That's how you got away?"

Natalia nods. "It was a really, really big snake," she elaborates, holding out her hands until she's indicating a girth that's as big as her head.

The four older teens exchange puzzled looks as Natalia stares up at them with wide eyes.

"I did see a snake that big the other day," Girl 11B says at last. "But I've never heard of the animals in the arenas killing each other before."

Boy 6B barks out a harsh laugh. "It's the Hunger Games, Maybelle. Maybe the animals are hungry too."

And just like that, the tension is gone. Natalia is one of them now.

They give her meat, cooked over a tiny fire in the back of the cave, and she shows them her knives and the contents of her bag, including two of the now-squashed fruit that Girl 11A calls a 'banana'.

There's one rough patch when they ask her where she got the extra clothes, but it's explained away easily when she tells them "I stole them from a boy who left them on a tree while he went swimming," and they laugh at her story.

Boy 7A comes back in from guard duty, and though Natalia volunteers to be next, the girls from 11 insist that she needs to rest. Girl 11B goes instead.

Natalia sleeps.

She doesn't wake up for the anthem, but when she does, Girl 11A fills her in.

"Anton from 5 died today," the older girl says, fiddling with her knife. "There're 27 of us left."

"27?" Natalia repeats, frowning. "Aren't there 30…something?"

Girl 6B shakes her head. "You must have missed some of the cannons. Seven tributes have died since the bloodbath." And she reels off a list of the remaining tributes.

Natalia sags against the wall. One week. One week since the Games started, and 21 tributes are dead.

"The Careers must be getting busy," Boy 7A says grimly.

…

Natalia gets a full three days of respite with her Herd before her false security comes crashing down.

By then, they're 25, not 27.

…

"Natalia? What's wrong?" asks Boy 7A when she freezes. He stands, rabbit dangling from his hand, and is answered by a spear in the chest.

A cannon. 24.

Natalia leans around the trunk of the tree, aims and throws in a split second. The knife arches smoothly, end over end, and embeds itself in the eye of Girl 2B.

A cannon. 23.

Very good, Natalia, says the Madame in her head.

A cannon. 22.

Natalia grabs the axe from Boy 7A's belt, wrenches the spear from his chest, slides the knife from Girl 2B's eye, and yanks the second and third spears from her cooling hands.

A cannon. 21.

She runs, throws the weapons save her knife aside in the undergrowth and sprints back towards the camp. The rain is now just a mist.

She's greeted by Girl 6B's twisted body slumped in a pool of blood at the edge of the camp. Her eyes stare sightlessly up past Natalia's face. There's a throwing knife lodged in her throat. Natalia pulls it free, wipes the blade on the dirt as more blood comes gushing out.

The camp itself is undisturbed. Natalia slinks up to the cave, but it's empty. Their supplies are all still inside.

On the far side of camp, she finds the undergrowth trampled and follows the trail. She finds Boy 6B slumped facedown at the base of a tree. There's a gaping wound in the middle of his back, above his heart. She checks his pulse anyways, but he's gone. She takes his knives and keeps going.

Girl 11B is sprawled about a hundred meters away. Natalia rushes up. She's still alive, but there's an arrow in her shoulder and she's convulsing in pain. Natalia pockets one of her knives and reaches out to touch her arm.

"Maybelle! Maybelle, what happened?" Natalia asks urgently. "Are they still here?"

Girl 11B smiles tightly. Her teeth are bloody; she'd bitten through her tongue. "Natalia. You're okay," she gasps, and she sounds so relieved that Natalia feels like she's the one who was impaled. "No, they're gone. I –" She grimaces and her eyes roll up in her head as she shudders. "Dana and I, we led them to a nest of vipers." She flops in arm to the side with effort, and Natalia sees an unmoving lump half-hidden in the bushes. "They ran, but we," another ripple of pain, "we were both bitten. We'll be dead in an hour."

"An antidote. Is there an antidote?" Natalia asks desperately. "The sponsors can send an antidote!"

With visible effort and a bitter smile, the older girl raises a hand to ruffle Natalia's hair. "Natalia. I don't want an antidote."

Natalia recoils. "Wh-what?"

"I was," she convulses, and when she recovers, she's panting. "Was never going to win. It's better like this."

"Maybelle," Natalia breathes.

"This way, I went out fighting," Girl 11B gasps, and writhes against the ground. Despite the pain, her eyes are warm. "Natalia, it – it would be really nice if you could win."

Natalia doesn't want to watch Girl 11B die slowly and in pain for an hour. She brings her knife in front of her, deliberately. The older girl's eyes fix on it, then flicker up to Natalia's face.

"Natalia, I can't—I can't ask you to," she pants.

"Please," Natalia says, reaching out to touch Girl 11B's face. "I don't want you to be in pain."

Girl 11B closes her eyes, nods. "Thank you," she whispers, opening her eyes.

Natalia slits her throat, and Girl 11B dies with a faint smile on her lips.

She goes to Girl 11A next. Her chest moves shallowly, and her breath hitches. Natalia rolls her onto her back, and her eyes flicker open, dazed but don't focus. They drift closed again. Natalia cuts her throat too.

It feels wrong, when she stands, brushes off her knees automatically, to leave these two girls who cared for her even in a game of killing just lying in the undergrowth.

She dredges up the old blessing Madame had taught them.

"May your suffering end," she says aloud at last, "and may your soul find rest."

…

There are seven faces in the sky that night. Natalia thinks that 11A's vipers got Boy 4B in the end.

When the anthem ends, she gets her first sponsor gift. From the sky floats a silvery parachute bearing a large coil of thin, matte wire. She smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "Thank you."

She's got the rest of her Herd's supplies in one backpack, and there's enough to last at least a couple of days. Probably longer.

She builds her web with the wire, retrieves the spears and other weapons to make it deadly. Once she's exhausted her coil of wire, she cuts vines and uses those. She makes stakes out of branches and sharpens them with her knife. Natalia spent the most time at the trap-making station in training, and now is her chance to put it to good use.

The Careers know she's alive, and they'll know where to find her. So she'll be waiting.

They don't come that night, which is fortunate, because Natalia needed that time to build her web. They don't come the next day either, so Natalia when she's done trapping a large circle around her cave, she spends the time in tense solitude. She re-bandages her arm and shoulder, stretches out so she knows her range of motion. She lays out her knives and cleans them with sure, practiced hands. When she's done, she sits with eyes clothed and just listens.

Make a life, take a life, the Madame always told her girls. Here in the Red Room, you must learn to do both.

Well, Natalia has never done the former, but she's definitely done the latter. It's a little messed up.

Crunch. A muffled shout. A cannon.

Natalia open her eyes and smiles.

She goes out to greet her guests. After all, the Madame always taught her to mind her manners.

On the left, Boy 1A is down with a stake between his eyes. Natalia hadn't been expecting that particular trap to work, but it's a pleasant surprise. She ducks just in time for an arrow to go whistling over her head and dives back into the cave as another just barely misses her hand.

A startled scream from the other side of the camp. Natalia peeks out and sees Girl 4A hanging from a tree branch, sawing at the rope around her ankle with a knife. She gets free and twists in the air to land on her feet, only to fall onto the stakes Natalia had hidden beneath a bush. A cannon.

Natalia pulls back when another arrow flies past, slicing a furrow into her shoulder. Blood wells up, but it's not debilitating. Their archer is starting to get dangerous, so she takes a moment to pinpoint his position from the angle of his arrows. She palms a knife, leans out, and hurls it.

A meaty thunk, followed by another cannon.

She slinks out of the cave, knives in hand, and looks around. Girl 1A has been caught by another snare, dangling with the wire digging into her ankle. It looks broken. She's a sitting duck; there are stakes under her trap too. Natalia sends a knife through her neck almost casually.

The rest are tuning around now. She's killed four of them, already. They're off-kilter, not sure what to do now that a twelve-year-old crybaby has effectively slaughtered half their number.

That's fine. They're in the middle of her web, after all.

She chases them, slashes a vine that sends a tripwire up right across Boy 1B's path. He goes down hard; Natalia knifes him in the back and keeps running.

She throws another knife, and stakes pop up in front of Boy 2B and Girl 2B. The pair hurdle them gracefully and keep running. Girl 4B pauses to hurl a spear back that Natalia just barely dodges.

Natalia throws her knives, not at the tributes, but at the vines tied taut against their respective trees and activates the rest of her traps. She ducks behind a tree as a tripwire shoots up and spears, stakes weighed with rocks, and Girl 11A's machete rain down on the Careers' heads. A cannon. She rounds the other side of the tree, and hurls another knife. Boy 2B deflects it with a sword, but Natalia can almost smell the blood from the wooden stakes in his back. Girl 2B has left him for dead, vanishing into the trees, and he and Natalia both know it.

She smiles at him. He snarls at her.

Even wounded, Boy 2B is not easy prey. Natalia loses herself in the rhythm of the fight, reacting to his slightest movements. Her knives clash against the blade of his sword, and she's forced back when he shoves. Then he feints, slashes down. She deflects with her knife, sends the other plunging towards his neck, but he sweeps his sword down and around and comes up to hit it away. An underhanded throw with her left hand before he can recover, and the knife slips up under his sternum. His sword falls from a lifeless hand.

Natalia sways, looks back at the carnage she's created. It starts to rain again.

…

Seven faces in the sky again, but all by Natalia's hand. There are eight faces between her and Clint and home.

Natalia swings her backpack onto her uninjured shoulder and leaves the cave. Most of her traps lie unused in the forest, but she doesn't think she'll be able to lure anyone else in.

Instead, she crosses the river, back towards the Cornucopia. After two weeks in the arena, even with the Quarter Quell, they're starting to wind down to the last few tributes. The Gamemakers usually herd the last survivors back towards the starting point, so she figures she'll save them – and herself – the trouble.

She scales a tree again to wait. In the afternoon, a pair of cannons go off within a minute of each other. At night, after the anthem, there's another.

The next day, she hears footsteps under her tree. She freezes, flattens herself against the branch, and draws her hood up.

It's Angry, and he's being chased by the girls from 9. There's a long knife in his hand, but one of the girls chasing him hurls one that hits him in the shoulder and he goes down. He scrambles up, but they're on him by the time he gets his feet under him.

He lashes out with his knife, catches one across the stomach. The other yells and attacks with viciousness if not skill. Angry doesn't know much about knives either, and barely manages to deflect. But he can't take down two of them, even with one injured, and there's a knife in his shoulder too. Natalia thinks it's a miracle he can even stand, let alone fight.

Against her better judgement, she grabs for the nearest vine and slides down one-handed, knife in her free hand. When her feet hit the floor she runs, but in the seconds it took, Angry is down again. She throws her knife before Girl 9A can slash his throat, and it hits true in the middle of her back. She collapses on top of him, and Girl 9B whirls to face her, knife in one hand and the other hand over the wound in her stomach.

She's no challenge for her, for all that the older teen is taller. She doesn't have the same ruthlessness as Natalia, and no week of training can overcome five years of it. Natalia's knife slides between her ribs, and she pushes the body aside as the cannon fires.

She heaves Girl 9A's body off Angry, but despite the fire in his eyes, he's clearly not going to make it. Blood is throbbing from a wound on his leg, gushing with a terrifying speed.

He glowers up at her, a bitter smile twisting his mouth. "Of course," he spits between gritted teeth, then his mouth goes slack. His cannon fires.

She doesn't know him. She didn't even like him, nor he her. "May your suffering end," she says anyways into the mist. "And may your soul find rest."

…

Madame was an anomaly in District 10. Not because she ran a brothel – 10 had several – but because the Peacekeepers turned a blind eye to her "Make a life, take a life" policy. Nobody messed with the Madame's girls. They were whores, but they were untouchable.

Growing up in the Red Room probably wasn't the healthiest lifestyle, but it gave Natalia a better chance of winning her Games than almost any other girl in the district. The Madame was a harsh taskmaster, but under her instruction, Natalia thrived. It made her a fighter, a survivor.

It gave her a taste of freedom and long nights under the stars with the sheep. Wool was the Red Room's official ware, and it gave her an excuse to leave the district for a few weeks at a time to the pastures outside. When Clint came along, it was the two of them until the end of time.

If Clint were here now, he'd be watching her back. Or 'Hey, Nat, watch this,' he'd say, and balance an arrow on the tip of his nose. He'd steal the last banana from her backpack, break it in half and split it with her.

Or he'd just sit with her, back to back in silence, a warm source of comfort.

Or maybe he'd stare at her in disgust, shy away from her touch, her with blood dripping from her hands.

No.

She can't lose it now.

She can't be his Nat.

Right now, she has to survive.

She has to win.

…

Girl 3B and Girl 7A both show up in the sky two nights later. Just like that, Natalia is in the top three.

She lingers at the edge of the Cornucopia clearing, stalks slow and careful through the trees each day, but she doesn't see any sign of the last two.

She runs low food, so she sets snares.

But somehow, she doesn't think she'll need them.

A cannon fires before she can check them, and Natalia knows the last girl is coming for her.

…

It's the tall blonde girl, the Capitol's favorite. Her knife comes whistling through the trees, and it's only Natalia's heightened paranoia that saves her, whirling and slashing the blade out of the air.

Girl 2B follows the knife, and she's fast and deadly and every bit Natalia's match and more.

Her beautiful face is twisted into a dark scowl. She's got a bruise blooming across her cheekbone and there's a darkened patch on her arm and a bulge around her upper thigh that suggests a bandage, so she's not entire unscathed after cutting a swathe through the other remaining tributes. Natalia draws a second knife in a flash and parries a blow that probably could have sliced her arm to the bone.

But Girl 2B's onslaught is unrelenting and furious, and Natalia takes a cut across her cheek, then another on her forearm when she can't quite get her knife up fast enough. She grits her teeth, backs up a few steps, but the older girl follows.

Reversing her grip on one of the knives, she smashes one of Girl 2B's knives aside and slashes down with her other knife, scoring a slash on her arm, but when it hits her torso, the blade bounces off. Girl 2B takes advantage of the opening and backhands her across the face with the pommel of a blade. Natalia stumbles backwards, and Girl 2B presses her advantage. Her knife finds Natalia's side; blood soaks her shirt and drips down to the waistband of her pants.

Natalia's blocks are weak, but the adrenaline lets her stay in the fight and she manages to get her blades up in time to deflect the other's knives.

She risks a quick look backwards, and Girl 2B lunges. Natalia leaps backwards, out of range, and backpedals furiously. Girl 2B gives chase, then surprise breaks through her furious snarl as she's yanked down into the ground, her ankle caught in the loop of Natalia's trap.

Natalia's on her before she can recover, a knife in the back.

The cannon fires. The trumpets blare. Caesar's booming voice fills the arena.

Natalia is the victor of the Quarter Quell.

She stands frozen, chest heaving, blood dripping from her side. She sways, but she doesn't feel the pain, not yet.

Her eyes are fixated on the body of Girl 2B, who died with Natalia's knife in her heart.

Her name was Yelena.

…

When she wakes up, everything is white. The blankets, the floor, the ceiling, her clothes. Everything except her mentor, who stands out starkly in his trademark black trench coat, leather eyepatch, and dark scowl. He helps her struggle into an upright position, sitting with her back against the headboard.

"I see you're back in the land of the living," he says, when she blinks up at him. Natalia doesn't reply. Fury sighs and runs a hand over his head. "Hate to break it to you, but you've gone and made a good mess out of everything," he tells her. "Capitol liked that cute lil innocent thing you had going. Not so much the cold killer who pulled the wool over their eyes."

On the little table next to her, she sees her pendent. The wooden hourglass is the color of rust now, stained with blood.

"I didn't – " she trails off, stares down at her hands, because she did. Silence yawns between them. "Marlin," she says instead. "Silka. Maybelle. Dana."

Incomprehension in Fury's eyes clears as she goes on, and he covers her hand with one of his, large and warm and comforting.

"Jago. Geia. Wiatt. Erynaia."

"You're not just a killer, Natalia."

The tears Natalia wouldn't let fall begin to spill down her cheeks. "Loretta. Yule. Dianco."

Fury pulls her roughly against his shoulder, tangles his fingers in her hair.

"Revana. Shenchi." Her voice breaks, muffled against Fury's coat. "Yelena."

She shudders as she cries silently. He holds her as she falls apart.

…

Her coronation is a big event.

Despite Fury's warnings, the crowd is enthusiastic and cheers wildly at her appearance. She deigns to acknowledge them with only a nod, which only heightens their excitement.

Natalia watches her Games with an icy calm mask.

She doesn't have an innocent shepherd girl façade this time around. Her dress is black and sleek with red details. The weight she lost during the games cuts angles in her face. She looks dangerous, and even Nimmo hadn't quite known how to treat her.

Her Games is a murder mystery. They paint her as a master assassin – a deadly killer hidden behind the appearance of a scared, clueless girl. She watches herself strangle Marlin into unconsciousness, slit his throat. Onscreen Natalia does nothing but observe as Silka hurls a spear into Breiran's chest before hurling the knife that lodges in Silka's eye.

"Natalia, you're okay," Maybelle says, and Natalia slits her throat. Dana's eyes open when Natalia flips her onto her back, and then she kills her too.

"May your suffering end," says Natalia in a voiceover. By itself, without context, it is haunting. "And may your soul find rest."

The other tributes are barely shown, and even the Career pack is treated as a sideshow attraction, with only glimpses until Natalia snares them all in her web and dispatches them one by one.

She doesn't recognize the face on the screen, cold and emotionless and splattered in blood.

They build up to her final battle with Yelena, switching between cuts of her setting her snares and Yelena hunting down Nassia from 12, who killed three other tributes before Yelena took her down.

The final battle is short but desperate. Natalia stares stonily at the screen as onscreen Natalia finally slams her knife into Yelena's back and stands.

The president himself appears to present her crown. "Congratulations, Natalia," he says.

She wonders if the blood she smells on his breath is real.

…

Fury is there to greet her when she steps off stage. His eyes are tired and regretful.

"Welcome to the Hunger Games," he says.

* * *

A/N This is the (almost) 2-year anniversary of me writing this piece (xposted from ao3). The writing is...not great? I hope it's better now, anyways, but I have a sequel (chapter) in progress that should be up in a couple days and then that'll be it for MYSE for now.


	2. May Your Soul Find Rest

Clint is waiting at the station when the Capitol train carries home a creature wearing the husk of his best friend. He is the only one standing on the platform when it blows in.

The doors hiss open, and then she's there.

"Nat!" he calls, and sprints forward and wraps her in his arms. He feels her elbows jab into his arms, the ribs protruding from her back, the way she stiffens in his embrace. She was thin before, but now she's almost skeletal. The angles of her face are sharp, and her eyes are lined with a black that gives her a dangerous, hunted cast. "You're home," he says, reverently, disbelieving.

She stares blankly ahead for a long moment. "I'm home," she echoes. Her voice is a whisper.

It's not true.

Her eyes are hollow and haunted. She does not walk so much as prowl. When Clint tells her how the sheep had missed her, she does not smile. She stares warily at the people in the marketplace from inside the station, flinches at every sudden sound that carries across the square.

"You're Clint. Correct?" Suddenly, there is a large man wearing all black leather - boots, trenchcoat, eyepatch - looming over him. Nicholas Fury, winner of the Eighteenth Hunger Games, and first Victor from District 10. A living legend

Clint lets go of Nat, leaning back discreetly. "Uh, yessir," he stutters, squinting up at the man and clinging to Nat's arm with one hand.

The man gives him a onceover. "Hmph," he says. He looks supremely unimpressed. "You can help me get her settled, then."

He means in the Victor's Village, which Clint finds out when they bypass first the town center, then the slums where the Red Room is entirely. Fury does not touch Nat, hardly acknowledges her. Clint ends up almost towing her by the wrist, which she barely allows - she does not look at him, does not talk to him, only keeps her eyes fixed blankly on the road.

The house that now belongs to Natalia is large, ostentatious, and very empty. Not of things - there's plush, gilded furniture everywhere that Clint is almost afraid to touch, paintings on the walls, and even a bowl of fresh fruit on the table - but it's silent. Lots of space and no one to fill it.

Nat sits mechanically on a couch. After some hesitation, Clint sits down beside her. Fury clomps upstairs, muttering something under his breath that Clint doesn't hear.

He sneaks a glance at Nat, who doesn't move. He clears his throat. "Mayflower gave birth last week," he says. "She was real particular about it - wouldn't stay in the barn, wanted to do it under that old elm tree in the fields."

Nat turns her head slightly in his direction, so he keeps going. "Gave birth real smooth, though. You were right; she popped out a little ewe lamb."

"Had to be, the way she was fussing," Nat rasps.

Clint grins. "Right? Well, she settled down real quick, after. Thought we could pay them a visit, later; the lamb's pretty cute."

Nat is silent for a long time. "I'd like that," she says at last.

What scares Clint the most about Nat is how quiet she is - more than quiet; silent. She had always been a calm child, a smile lurking on her lips easily enough and a sharp, clever tongue she wielded with precision. Now, her eyes are cold and tired and old all at once, the rest of her face smooth and expressionless. When she speaks it is in a whisper or a low rasp.

When he comes out of the spare bedroom at dawn to see her sitting at the too-big oak table, staring blankly at the wall and says, "Let's go to the Red Room," she blinks once, slowly, and stands mechanically. He half-expects her to walk straight out the door, but she ghosts past him and up the stairs, leaving him standing in the middle of the floor. "Nat?" he calls tentatively, but she does not respond.

He makes his way to the kitchen, figuring he'll at least make her breakfast before he heads out, and hears the shower that must be upstairs turn on. In the refrigerator, there is a selection of cured meats, cheeses, and vegetables. He takes out some sausage and a soft, pale cheese - there's a crusty loaf of bread on the counter, and he finds a knife from a block next to the stove. When Nat pads back down noiselessly, hair damp and tied back in a loose braid, he startles badly and drops the knife with a clatter.

"Jesus, Nat," he yelps, clutching a juice-stained hand to his heart. She stares at the bread - sliced and topped with cheese - and at the apples he'd been cutting. "There's food," he says unnecessarily, gesturing.

Her eyes narrow, and she turns away from the table. He stuffs an apple slice in his mouth and wraps everything else up in cheesecloth.

"Hey, at least have an apple," he calls, but she isn't listening. He frowns and snags another, whole, apple from the bowl on the table, and makes for the door. "Here," he says, thrusting the fruit in front of her as he passes.

Before he can so much as flinch, she's grabbed his wrist in an iron grasp and his shoulder with her other hand and twisted, bringing all her body weight to bear.

He hits the floor hard, struggling to suck in a breath as he blinks away the stars. When he does, Nat's face is inches from his, her eyes wild and the most intent they'd been since she stepped off that train.

In a heartbeat, she lets go, backing up several paces. "Sorry," she rasps.

Clint sits up tentatively. There's a tender bump on the back of his head. The bundle of food is now on the floor several feet away, but he's still holding the apple. He looks at it, then at her. She stares back uncertainly, lips pressed together tightly. "Well, you may as well eat it," he says, and tosses it slowly.

Word travels quickly, even in a District as big as 10. And every single person in 10 has seen Nat set the record for most individual kills in Hunger Games history live on television.

Anyone who has worked with any animal, let alone a predator, knows better than to show them fear. But Clint can see it in the way they walk, stiff and deliberate, in the way there just so happens to be a generous amount of space between the two of them and everyone else, in the carefully casual expressions on their faces.

They don't pass many other children - most are in school, the only sure-fire way to get a free meal - but those too young to attend or too needed by their parents to work are quickly drawn away from the streets. One boy sees them coming and freezes like a deer until his mother shoves him roughly back into their shop.

He sneaks a glance at Nat. She has her mask on again, smooth and expressionless as porcelain. It stays on as they wind into the seedier region of the district, where the old men smoking on stoops stare at her openly, warily.

The Red Room's heavy wooden door opens before they reach it. "Clint," the Madame says, her face unreadable. "Natalia."

"No," says Nat, low and vehement. Clint stares at her, taken aback.

The Madame is not fazed. "Then..?"

Nat hesitates. "Natasha," she says. "My name is Natasha."

The Madame scrutinizes her. Nat meets her eyes steadily.

"Clint and Natasha," the Madame says. "You are late. The flock is restless. I expect you both to be punctual tomorrow."

"Yes, ma'am," says Clint, a beat too late when Nat - Natasha - doesn't say anything.

"Good," says the Madame, and they turn to go. "Natasha," the Madame says, almost as an afterthought, and Nat turns smoothly with her old dancer's grace. "It's good to have you back."

Nat resurfaces in bits and pieces. She comes out to tend the sheep with him, though now he's the only one who is paid for it. She has no need for the small allowance, let alone the food and board the Red Room had harbored her with.

She tries going to school once but comes back tense, eyes cold, and doesn't say anything for the next three days no matter how much Clint prods and cajoles. After that, she takes the reading materials and teaches both herself and Clint out in the pastures, under the sunlight - and whatever else they need to learn, they learn from the girls at the Red Room.

Watching the sheep gives them both something to do. When the winds cool and the leaves drop from the trees in droves, Clint catches Nat smiling when he trips on an exposed root, sending himself headfirst into a mud puddle. He comes up sputtering and indignant, and sees Nat watching him silently, the corner of her mouth tugging upwards in a small smirk.

"Ha, ha," he grumbles, but can't keep the grin off his own face.

He complains all the way back home, after they get the sheep back in, which she tolerates with a vague amusement. She lets him take first shower, and he hums as the hot water sluices away the mud. When he clomps back downstairs in loose fleece pants and a t-shirt, Fury is sitting at the table in his trademark blacks.

This is not unusual. Natasha's mentor comes over frequently, usually with dinner, since Nat doesn't cook and Clint's culinary talents are sadly limited - particularly since he can't even reach the stove without a chair.

Tonight, however, Nat is sitting rigidly as if carved from marble, and Fury's mouth is a grim slash. There is a pot of stew steaming gently on the table that smells amazing, but neither of them has touched the bowls in front of them. Clint's heart sinks. Any good cheer left over from the afternoon evaporates.

Fury meets his eyes. "It's time for the Victory Tour," he says, and turns Clint's world on its head once again.

It pours miserably the first day they're gone, so he stays indoors on the plush sofa with a mug of hot water and turns the television on. Nat is in District 12 on his screen in glorious technicolor, her eyes and cheekbones outlined in dramatic shadows. Her hair spills in splashes of fire past her shoulders, stark against her high-collared black dress. Behind her looms Fury in his full leathers, glowering in his trenchcoat as the wind whips it about his legs.

She doesn't look miserable. She looks fierce and cold and every bit the Victor that she is. Her chin is tilted up defiantly, even as she recites almost robotically from her cards.

Clint tucks his feet under him and shivers. She looks empty.

The crowd shifts restlessly. Clint flips through the briefing packet Fury left behind, that Clint never saw Nat even touch. District 12 is probably the kindest place for her to start: Natasha killed nobody from their District, and actually avenged the death of Nassia, the closest Twelve had gotten to a Victor since Steve Rogers won the Tenth Hunger Games, by killing District 2's Yelena.

It feels strange, to think of Nat like that - as a killer. Nat is sarcasm and playful jabs and quicksilver. She stays up with colicky lambs and drives away the mountain lions. She is his best friend, his other half, the only one he trusts to watch his back.

Clint leaves the television on but largely ignores it. He's only really in the house to eat and sleep, and during the day it's mostly playing recaps from Nat's Games that he doesn't need to rewatch. But once a day, when he gets back from the pastures, he'll huddle on the couch with a blanket and watch bits from her speeches until he falls asleep.

On the last day, Nat is in the Capitol. Clint stays at home and watches the words drop from her mouth like dust. Her image is perfectly sculpted, grace and remorselessness and danger, but her eyes are empty. He turns off the television and goes to bed.

The next morning, he almost has a heart attack when he wakes up and finds Nat in his room, staring at him. His startled yell comes out as a strangled wheeze, and he clutches his chest as he stares at her blearily.

She's shaking.

"Nat? What's wrong?" he forces out, blinking away the sleep.

"I messed up," she whispers. Her eyes are huge in her pale face.

Clint sits up. "What happened?"

"There was a man," she says, her eyes unfocusing. "He reached, he touched - " she breaks off, pressing her lips together. Clint clenches his hands so tightly his bones creak. "I stabbed him," she says. "In the shoulder, with a dinner knife. On live TV."

"Oh," says Clint, his mind going blank with mingled horror and fury.

Without warning, Nat throws herself forward, clutching at him desperately, and he clings back as her breaths shudder uncontrollably.

Fury comes to collect her for the Harvest Festival. Nat hauls herself upright, smoothes out her clothes, and takes a deep breath.

Clint, crosslegged on the bed, asks, "What's going to happen?"

Fury looks tired. "I don't know," he admits.

What happens is this: nothing.

Nothing happens. Nat doesn't get dragged off to the Capitol. Her winnings are delivered as usual. Nobody so much as mentions what happened during that dinner.

Clint begins to relax. Nat does not.

One day, when they've taken the sheep out to the fields over the ridge for a week-long outing, she takes out a set of throwing knives - which Clint had never seen, and had no idea where she'd gotten them - carves an X into a tree, and starts hammering them into the target from twenty meters out. She takes out her old hunting knives too and hurls those as well.

"Uh," says Clint, his attention now far away from the sheep.

Nat gestures imperiously at the target, now riddled with knives. "Now you," she says.

Clint side-eyes her a little but unslings the recurve from his back nonetheless. He sets his feet, reaching up almost absently for an arrow from his quiver. It's second nature, that draw and release, the satisfying thud of arrowhead into wood. He empties his quiver into the target and turns to Nat, eyebrow raised, but she's not looking. She's already striding to the target.

"Again," she says, once they've collected their weapons and retreated. Clint gives the equivalent of a mental shrug and raises his bow, but she shakes her head. "With these," she says, and hands him the knives.

Clint isn't bad with knives, but it's archery he's really good at. He hesitates. Nat narrows her eyes at him until he grimaces and slings his bow back over his back.

Twenty meters is a long way to throw a knife. Clint's first attempt falls embarrassingly short, going blade down in the grass. His second and third hit the roots. From the corner of his eyes, he can see Nat frowning. His next ones arch through the air and lodge in the trunk just shy of the target.

Nat crosses her arms. "Again," she says.

After that it's wind sprints. Natasha is unrelenting and Clint was already a little afraid of her even before she got dragged into the Games, so he does as she says even as his lungs burn and his legs tremble and fold beneath him like the new lambs.

Natasha is not in much better shape than him. She's just a little bit taller than him but thinner, and never quite gained back the weight she lost during in the arena. Her knees are locked with the effort to stay upright as she sways.

"Uh, so that was fun," Clint gasps in between snatches of breath, "but- " he has to stop for a moment because he gets lightheaded. "Why - why are we doing this?"

Natasha glares, and there is something fiery and fierce and _fearful_ lurking in her eyes. Clint lets his head thump back against the ground and decides to humor her worry, for all the good it'll do. As shepherds, they're allowed to defend their flocks against predators, but they're pushing dangerously close against the Capitol ban on learning to fight.

Fury drops by for dinner after about a week, when they finally return to the town. Clint thinks he'll be able to reassure her, tell her it's just paranoia. He doesn't. In fact, he agrees with her.

"I've spoken with some of my contacts," he growls, spearing a chunk of turkey - _turkey_ , the decadence never fails to unnerve him. "There's precedence for the kind of - situation. The Capitol prefers to control their Victors through the people they care about."

Clint's turkey, smothered in gravy, turns to dust in his mouth. He coughs and reaches for his water.

Nat's grip tightens on her fork briefly before loosening. She reaches for the broccoli without responding.

"I'm sorry to say," Fury says over his stifled coughs, "that the probability of Clint becoming a tribute in the next Hunger Games just increased exponentially."

That effectively kills his appetite. Natasha doesn't eat much to begin with; there's large platter of food left untouched. When Natasha rises and goes up the stairs without a word, her face expressionless, Clint puts the leftovers back in the fridge, driven by his ingrained food-hoarding instinct. Fury is still sitting at the too-big table, arms crossed across his chest as he watches Clint move around the kitchen almost apologetically.

Clint reaches for the used bowls. His hands are shaking. The porcelain slips from his grip and shatters on the hardwood floor with a crash, and he jumps back to avoid the spray of shards. He swallows and turns to get a dustpan, but his vision blurs and he finds himself sitting on the floor.

There's a sigh and a creak of a chair as Fury stands up. "I'm sorry, kid," he says.

Clint has nowhere to go, so he goes home.

"Look who decided to visit their dear brother," Barney drawls when he slinks in. "Done kissin' up to Romanova?" There's no venom in his comments. Clint reads the exhaustion in the line of his body, dirt smeared on his work clothes and caked in his boots. His eyes are sunken, older by far than his sixteen years.

"She hired me," Clint reminds his older brother, and drops a satchel of bread and meats on the table.

Barney eyes it with distaste, but nobody in 10 has pride enough to deny free food. Not when it will stave off the tesserae for another month. "And you're still workin' for that whorehouse."

"Yeah," says Clint, slumping on a rickety stool beside him. He lets his head rest against the splintery surface.

Barney squints at him keenly and knocks back a swallow of cheap beer. "You ain't maimed. You ain't doin' hard labor. Ain't nobody's death anniversary. What's got you all worked up?"

Clint runs his tongue over his teeth. "Nothin'."

Barney snorts. "Bull. You think I can't tell when my baby brother's chewin' on somethin' he can't handle?" He flicks his empty cup unerringly across the kitchen into the sink, where it lands with a loud clatter.

Clint huffs out a half-laugh and sits up, hunched over his stool. "You should be honored," Clint says, almost mockingly. "You're in the presence of District 10's male tribute for the 26th Annual Hunger Games." When he doesn't get a response, he chances a glance at his brother.

Barney is staring at him, completely still. "Cuz of Romanova," he says, more a statement than a question. Barney used to call her Natalia, before. But the Games change a person, and the Games change a district.

Even Clint doesn't have the energy to defend her, not this time, not tonight. "Yeah," he says.

They sit in silence. Finally, Barney rises with a long exhale, scraping the legs of his chair against the scratched and dirt-caked planks. "I'm sorry," he says, and shuffles past.

Barney loves him; Clint knows this to his bones. But in the Games, family doesn't stand for each other. And honestly, Clint wouldn't want him to. As his brother rustles around the tiny bathroom, Clint pushes his way back out of the rickety shack.

This may be his home, but there is no place for him here.

The curfew is closing fast, but Clint lets his feet carry him mindlessly through the District until he ends up in front of the Red Room's barn. He lets himself in, wades his way through the sheep huddled in clumps to bed down for the night, and clambers up the ladder to the hayloft. It's warm and quiet there, out of the biting chill of the wind.

Clint buries his face in his elbows, and if he maybe lets a couple of hot tears leak into his sleeves, who's going to tell?

Come dawn, there's no sign of Nat. Clint ignores the hollowness in his stomach with ease and slides down to herd the sheep into the near pasture, the one the Peacekeepers can overlook from the tower in the square. It's too close, too dangerous by far to do any of Nat's training, but he isn't in the mood right now anyways.

Instead, he sits crosslegged in the grass and picks twigs out of Blackberry's wool. It's thick now, full and curly and prone to picking up sticks, dirt, leaves, and pretty much anything else that moves. He'll have to shear the flock soon, he thinks absently. Once lambing season is over. After that, it'll be weaning, and breeding for the autumn lambing.

But Clint won't see that - the autumn lambing. He'll be dead.

He's not being negative, it's just a fact. Twenty-four kids go in. One comes back out. And that one is not the best friend of a Victor who has pissed off the Capitol in the most embarrassing incident since the gossip grapevine passed down the story of how the winner of the Eleventh Hunger Games had allegedly stolen a Peacekeeper uniform several years before his Games and hitchhiked on the supply train to Twelve, where he befriended the future Victor of the Ninth Hunger Games before making his way back to District Eight without getting caught.

Clint wasn't sure if that had actually happened, but he did know that Barnes' family had paid the price - both parents dead in a 'manufacturing accident' less than a month after the news broke, a sister entered in the Tenth Games. She'd died a gruesome death at the jaws of a mutt pack, savaged for a full five hours before her cannon fired.

Well, Clint would take a knife to his own throat before he let that happen to him. End it quick. Fight for the chance to die cleanly.

There's always stepping onto the grenade, but it isn't really Clint's nature to just roll over. No, he'll fight.

For all the good that'll do.

He drops the debris he collected from Blackberry's fleece and stands, turning as he dusts his hands off. A shot of adrenaline jolts ice-cold through his veins when he sees Nat standing behind him, eyes haunted and miserable and terrible, rage and grief and horror mingled together. Her arrival is sudden, silent, and so _Nat_ that Clint feels a reluctant smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

She scowls automatically, but even that melts away quickly under the shadow of guilt. Clint hates that. Nat doesn't _feel_ guilty - she's proud and deliberate and never looks back. But now she does, and it's because of him.

He points to the pile of litter he pulled from the ewe. "I think Blackberry's fixin' to start a collection," he says. "Bella and the rest, too."

Nat gives him a look that tells him she knows exactly what he's trying to do, but moves over to Bella anyways. The ewe pays her no mind as she browses through the new grass.

Clint hopes this is what he remembers of her - here, in the meadow and away from the District, moving careful fingers through the sheep's wool with eyes far softer where no one else is around. Nat's hair, long and flame-colored in tangled waves down her back as the wind brushes it up from her shoulders. Just them and the sheep. This memory he can at least take with him.

The heat returns. Time drags Clint kicking and screaming to the Reaping until he finds himself setting out his nicest shirt, collared and made from rough wool, and a pair of slacks at the end of his bed in anticipation of the next day's event.

He sits, dimpling the mattress, and fingers the cloth of the pants absently. They're not new, technically. He bought them from a used clothing stall in the markets with money from the salary Nat insisted on giving him since she now has no use for money with the regular deliveries from the Capitol - her Victor's spoils. Between Nat and the Red Room, Clint could buy a week's worth of clothes, brand new, but it doesn't quite feel right.

He doesn't doubt for a second that taking Nat's money has bought him more suffering in the arena, but maybe even from the moment he'd met her - tiny and pale, hovering in the doorway to the Red Room in the shadow of the Madame - it had been too late for him.

But Clint doesn't regret meeting her, even if that's the road that led him here today, and he doesn't want to spend the time he has left thinking about it. He leaves his clothes and takes the stairs down to the dining room. Fury has brought a spread of the best Ten's markets have to offer, and it's all laid out on the table. He's in the kitchen, now, rummaging through the cabinets.

And Nat - Nat stands stock still in the middle of the floor, and when she looks up, her eyes fixate blankly on Clint's face. He edges forward, and her stare follows. She's tense but trying not to show it, given away only in the slight flex of the muscles in her neck.

Clint, on the other hand, is strangely, overwhelmingly calm. He jerks a thumb at the food. "You gonna sit down?"

She doesn't move, but her eyes narrow slightly. Clint shrugs, grabs a plate, and starts loading up. He's not used to eating a ton - even after moving in with Nat, he preferred quick, light food - but hey, it's the last time he'll ever set foot in the District, and Fury picked up all his favorites: thin grilled slices of beef with sweet-salty sauce, sticky, short-grained rice that's pure white, and salty fried potato chunks. May as well enjoy it.

Fury and Nat join him at the table, the former watching him thoughtfully, the later eating mechanically, eyes fixed on her plate.

There's a knock at the door, and Clint jumps up, pushing back his chair. "I got it!" he calls, and skids over to the door on socked feet. The cool summer breeze swirls in as he opens it, and he stops short.

Barney shoves his hands in his pockets. "Hey, baby bro," he says. His face is smeared with dirt, his clothes rumpled, and he smells strongly of cow dung.

Clint hasn't gone home in months, and never when Barney's home. They both know what'll happen when he gets Reaped, the scrutiny his brother would be under if people knew they were close. The glimpses he'd caught of Barney across town - Clint was sure each time that it'd be the last time he saw his brother.

"Hey," he says, mouth suddenly dry. "Um, you want to come in?"

"Naw," says Barney, predictably, but there's a tightness in his face that belays his unconcerned drawl. "Jus' wanted to, y'know."

Clint does know, and he smiles weakly. "Thanks," he says. "For coming, I mean."

His brother steps closer, into his personal space, and cups the back of his neck with one calloused hand. Clint inhales a lungful of dried sweat, tobacco, and Barney's musk "Take care o' yourself," Barney says roughly, fiercely. "And…" he hesitates. "End it fast, if you can. Don't - don't let them - "

"Yeah," says Clint, and reaches for his brother, but Barney lets go and shoves him back a step.

"I gotta go," he says, backing away. "Clean up for tomorrow an' all that." Clint watches as his brother turns, slouching his way out of the Victor Village, back to the shack on the edge of town they called home. In just a few minutes, his tiny, bobbing shadow is gone.

Barney won't be coming to see him off tomorrow. This is goodbye. This is final.

He feels...detached.

Clint goes back to the dinner table. He eats his food and he enjoys it. He talks a lot about the sheep, how Marienette at the Red Room has a sweet spot for one of the cattlehands. He ignores the heavy silence when he chews, weighing as heavily as Fury's stare. After dinner, he goes upstairs to bed and falls asleep right away.

He wakes up. He gets Reaped as Nat stands behind him in full makeup, stony-faced the entire ceremony. He follows the Peacekeepers off the stage.

None of it feels real.

And it doesn't right up until he's in a room by himself, staring at the door that will not let in family and friends.

Barney's said his goodbyes. Nat and Fury will be on the train already, beginning preparations for their training. And while the Madame had visited Nat, Nat was Red Room through and through. Clint was more of a mascot, a harmless pet that knew better than to bother the girls whether or not they were working.

He's alone. Nobody is coming to see him off. And the ache in his chest he never even noticed grows and grows until he's all but choking, trying to draw in breath.

He gasps, a shuddering inhale, and swallows down the anguish that must be visible on his face. It's not over yet.

(He wishes it was.)

"This is purple," Clint says, completely deadpan.

"What? No, of course not," says Pimeferous scornfully, and Clint is momentarily distracted by the flash of the gemstones embedded into the back of the man's hands. "How droll your mind must be. No, this is a deep amethyst. Quite the fitting color, after all, since you come from the District of the reigning Victor. Be a darling and put on that hat."

Clint grits his teeth and reaches obligingly for the the golden straw cowboy hat with the double-wide brim. "What happened to, uh, Nimmo?" he asks desperately, trying to force himself to actually put the ridiculous thing on.

"Promoted, of course," Pimeferous says dismissively. "A Victor's stylist stays with them for the rest of their career. Quite lucrative, really, for someone with no sense of flare like that hack." He plucks the hat from Clint's hands and plops it onto his carefully dishevelled hair. "There we go," he says in satisfaction, spinning Clint bodily around to face the mirror. "Art."

Clint stares at his reflection dubiously. His sleeves are puffy and gauzy, gathered at the wrist in a delicate bunch. And everything save his vest and hat and belt buckle are all an eye-searing purple. He supposes he does vaguely resemble the cowboys in Ten who ride herd on the cattle, if they wore bright colors and giant belt buckles and something called _chiffon_ instead of rough, homespun flannel and denim. The pants and gold vest are both uncomfortably stiff and tight, constricting his movement and pinching certain tender areas. His reflection glares back at him with a liberally airbrushed face that reminds Clint of the oil portraits of the President hanging in the town hall back home. He's a caricature.

"What do you think?" Pimeferous asks eagerly, shuffling through a box of gold bangles.

Clint has listened to Fury's lectures not to anger the stylists. "Great," he lies with as much enthusiasm as he can muster.

It's so completely unfair that he has to spend his last birthday pandering to these entitled pricks, like a walking, talking mannequin. But if he doesn't, they'll take it out on Nat by taking it out on him in the arena.

That's the only thought keeping him from chucking the floor-length mirror out the window when Pimeferous approaches him wielding a jar of sparkly purple face paint.

Clint knows that the fastest way to completely screw himself over is to let the Gamemakers know he can shoot a bow and arrow. Instead, he lets the hand-to-hand trainer slam him into the mat a couple dozen times, browses through the plants workstation, and even tries to swing a sword as the Careers snicker.

The blades are much too big for him to wield effectively, and despite a year of eating Nat's food, Clint's not strong enough to handle them. There's a boy from Seven, however, who's pretty good.

Clint hits the dining hall as early as possible, choosing a table in the far back corner where he can keep an eye on everyone. Most tributes are sitting with their Districtmates; any alliances aside from the Careers must be claudestine, or perhaps don't normally form during training the way they did Nat's year.

"It's the Amazing Grape!" A lunch tray slams down next to Clint's with gusto. Jacques had been blessed with raven hair, rare robin-blue eyes, and most importantly, a conservative stylist that knew how to take advantage of those. "What a fucking shitshow."

"Sod off," says Clint halfheartedly, but out of all the tributes, he minds Jacques probably the least.

Heads turn in the dining hall, but the District Seven tribute ignores them all. "So damn many people came out just to fucking watch us parade down the fucking street like shitty fucking peacocks," he grumbles, stabbing his fork into his hearty chunk of steak.

Javelynn from Two sends Jacques a deadly glare that increases in intensity with every expletive that drops from his mouth. Clint grimaces in consternation.

"I can't help it, these assholes just bring it out in me," the other boy complains, noticing his expression.

Clint eyes him dubiously. "Jesus. You gonna get through the interview okay?"

"It's fine, I'm French," Jacques says dismissively, throwing him a wink.

Clint frowns. "What does that even mean?"

"Don't know." Jacques shrugs. "My mother used to say it, and she always says she got it from her mother."

"Well, don't paint another target on me," he mutters. "I got a big enough one on me already."

The other boy eyes him keenly. "Cause you're close with Romanova?" he asks in a hushed voice.

"Ain't," Clint lies. "Romanova ain't close with nobody. That's how I got dragged into this." His eyes drift over to Penny, his fellow District 10 tribute, sitting alone two tables over for today at their mutual agreement, and wonders if Nat's training her the way Fury trained her.

Jacques is sharp enough to notice Clint's momentary distraction. "The grapevine thinks Romanova's sabotaging her training to give you a better chance," he says conversationally.

Clint snorts. "No," he says with certainty. "She's training her specifically to kill me."

Under the spotlight and the scrutiny of thousands, Clint sweats.

"So, Clint." There's a twinkle in Caesar's eye. "There's a rumor going around that you and the mysterious Miss Natalia Romanova are an item."

"Aw, no," says Clint in dismay, and that startles a couple titters out of the crowd. In the front row, Jacques rolls his eyes hard. "We're thirteen!"

Caesar hums with a secretive smile. "I heard you two are living together already."

The crowd gasps collectively, gleefully scandalized. Clint's ears burn. "No, you got it wrong," he says. "She used to herd the sheep with me. Money's kinda tight for me, so when she came back she gave me a job. I clean and cook and take care of her house and stuff. I stay over sometimes, yeah, but that's so I can make her breakfast or something."

Thankfully, the man doesn't lean on his story too hard. "Do you think that's given you an edge in the Games, living with a Victor?" Caesar suggests. "Sometimes," he adds, and winks at the audience, who murmur appreciatively.

"Not really. She doesn't talk much - " Clint cuts himself off. If he says she doesn't talk about her Games, what would that do to her image? She was already under so much scrutiny.

Caesar takes his abrupt pause in stride. "Ah, the cold and enigmatic Natalia," he laments. "She's a mentor this year." The audience stirs in interest - her Games is still fresh on their minds. "Have you worked with her at all?"

"No, just Fu - Mr. Fury," he corrects. "Don't think I'll see her much since she's trainin' Penny. Penelope. She's pretty busy; she prob'ly don't want to deal with me." He pauses. "Not that I want her to 'deal' with me," he jokes weakly, before he can think better of it.

Caesar shudders dramatically. "I have chills," he says mock-seriously. He leans forward urgently. "Are you in danger when you go back to District 10, talking about her here?" He widens his eyes comically. "She's quite intimidating, Natalia."

"I ain't going back," Clint confesses.

"Come now - " Caesar begins cajolingly, but Clint's on a roll and keeps on talking.

"Everything Natalia pretended to be, she wasn't," Clint reveals, slouching a little in his seat and leaning almost unconsciously towards Caesar. "Helpless, lost, afraid - she wasn't any of those things. But I am."

A surprised laugh ripples through the audience. Baron, the boy from One, snorts. Javelynn from Two leers at Clint. Caesar shoots him a wry grin. "Should you really be telling me this?" he stage-whispers.

And maybe it is too revealing but Clint's going to be dead inside of a week and he no longer cares. "It's true," he says. "Natalia always had a plan, going in. She _knew_ she was coming out the other side in one piece. But me?" He shrugs. "I know I ain't walkin' outta that arena alive. I can't fight - you saw my training score - and I dropped out of school to herd sheep, so I ain't that bright either."

Caesar is serious now. "Surely you're not going to just give up?" he prods, and Clint is struck by the unexpected sincerity in his voice.

Clint laughs. It catches in his throat. "Naw, 'course not," he says. "It's the opposite. I gotta make my District proud. This is me, backed into a corner. Whoever kills me, I'm gonna give them hell before I go."

The buzzer goes off.

Clint takes his seat back with the other tributes, wiping his palms discreetly on his pants. The applause from the audience isn't wild, but it is a little thoughtful. Hopefully, it was enough for the Gamemakers to let another tribute kill him instead of a mutt.

He steals a glance at the Careers out of the corner of his eye. They're watching him back - discreetly, predatorily. He takes a deep breath and tries to pay attention as Caesar coaxes Eleven's Mariah through her interview. He thinks of the pastures of home, and he thinks of the trees.

In his ridiculously opulent, minimalist quarters, Clint's moving picture wall has a view of a forest from high up among the branches. They're tall, green trees with needles instead of leaves and a deep reddish-brown bark. He watches it that night, and wishes he could have seen the real thing.

Nat pads into his quarters again that night on soundless feet, and he's jolted out of the light daze he slipped into while facing his picture wall when she climbs onto the bed next to him and settles her back against hers. She doesn't speak tonight, like every other night after they'd arrived in the Capitol. He closes his eyes and focuses on her even breathing. This is all he needs.

Clint lets Pimeferous dab his face with powder. He's in the arena uniform, now - a sleek, padded vest with dark red-purple accents over a longsleeved black shirt, black trousers, and black boots with thick soles. His token from Nat, a wooden arrowhead on a cord, hangs around his neck. He studies his reflection one last time and walks out of the room.

Fury shakes his hand. "You're a good kid," he says gruffly - probably the nicest thing Clint's ever heard him say. "Give 'em hell."

"Thanks, sir," he says, because what else is there to say?

Clint thinks his arena is the most bizarre in the history of the Games. Usually, it's nothing but total wilderness, the only man-made structure in sight the cornucopia.

No so, for Clint's Games.

There's trees and grasses and shrubbery here, too, but in the distance loom tall, rectangular structures, half-choked by greenery. A glance behind him shows more of the same, and even in this wide-open clearing, he can see chunks of grey beneath the grass. There's even a bizarre, waterwheel-like structure rising out of the ground, half-swallowed by woody vines.

Clint thinks about running the way Nat did during her Games, but there's a quiver ten meters and a bow fifteen meters ahead of him, and what's even the point of going down fighting if he has nothing to fight with? He glances to either side. He's got Lotus on his left and District 2's Buck on his right, but Lotus'll go straight for the naginata laid tantalizingly at the cornucopia's mouth, and Buck spent most of his time at the swordfighting station in training.

He can do this without getting killed painfully. No big deal.

The cannon fires and Clint is off, pouring every ounce of speed Nat eked out of him through her wind sprint drills. He scoops up the quiver, shoving the strap over his head, and keeps running. He risks a glance to the side to see Lotus bolting for the cornucopia with her head down, and he knows she's going to fly past without a second glance. He reaches down for the bow without breaking stride, but before his fingers can do more than brush its smooth surface, someone slams into him, hard.

He hits the ground on his back, landing on the quiver, and Buck slugs him full in the face. Clint's head snaps back, but he's not so out of it that he doesn't see the opening the older tribute's left him by kneeling over him. He lashes out when Buck winds up for another punch and hits him full in the crotch.

Buck grunts and doubles over, and Clint shoves him off, scrabbling for his feet in the grass. A shout; someone's sprinting at them from the cornucopia. Whoever it is isn't good news for Clint, so reluctantly but speedily, he whips around and sprints for the cover of the trees. He glances over his shoulder, and Buck's half-staggered, bow in hand, while Lotus charges up behind him.

At the edge of the clearing, nearly hidden under a shrub, is the sprawled body of a male tribute. There's a knife protruding from the middle of his back and a backpack with straps tangled in his fingers. Clint risks veering out a little to snatch the backpack away before vaulting over a bush and into the relative safety of the trees.

He doesn't think they'll follow; there's too much temptation at the cornucopia with tributes too desperate or too stupid to avoid the bloodbath. But he'll need to put some distance between him and them before the hunting begins.

Clint reaches one of the structures about an hour later. He gives it a wide berth and keeps going. When he reaches the fourth what feels like five hours later in the middle of the afternoon, however, he draws an arrow out of his quiver and advances into the mossy doorway. It's definitely concrete underneath, but years of wilderness have since reclaimed it.

Clint edges around the corners warily, but bit by bit he traverses it in its entirety - all empty, both of _things_ and of people. There's nothing here but plants and plant debris. He chooses a high room with a tree leaning out the window, its roots tearing up through the floor, and hunkers down for a break. He pulls the quiver and backpack off his shoulders and opens the latter.

There's a water bottle - full, thank god. There's also three small utility knives, a bundle of cord, a large pouch of nuts, and nothing else. Clint allows himself just a sip of water; he'll have to look for a clean source later, but he spent a good amount of energy running and he was parched. But with the nuts, he'd have a little time before he'd really go hungry. He didn't have much to hunt with.

Not grabbing the bow is his biggest regret right now. Clint's got a good two dozen arrows now and nothing to shoot them from.

But for now, he's set. Food, water, and a good vantage point. He'll just rest here a bit.

At night, Clint finds his way onto the roof for the anthem. There's a slideshow of faces in the sky, and it's almost surreal to know that these other kids - that he'd seen alive and well just this morning - are now nothing more than cold, bloody corpses.

He doesn't see Penny up there, or Jacques - both a blessing and a curse. If he's not making it out of here, he'd rather one of them did. Unfortunately, minus the girl from One, all the Careers are still alive - Baron and Buck and Javelynn and Gene and Lotus. That makes nine faces in the sky tonight. Clint stays up on the roof even after the last notes fade away.

He can pretend it's peaceful, just for a bit.

Clint lies flat on the roof and scrutinizes the forest around him. There's a glimmer through the trees - moonlight off water, perhaps. There's little flickers of movements in the trees and on the ground. He makes out a small rabbit browsing at the base of a tree and hears the distant cry of an owl, catches the flutter of wings among the branches.

Night time is hunting time. The animals are out, emboldened by the cover of darkness. But he doesn't want to risk a fire, and he doesn't have anything to use to make one easily, so for right now, he'll have to skip the hunting.

Besides, the Careers will be hunting too. Clint wants to avoid running into them for as long as possible.

Clint retreats back into his building. There was a pretty big fallen tree in one of the rooms, and he's always wanted to try making his own bow.

It's been a day of complete silence, and the only warning Clint gets that he's become complacent is when he feels the rumble. It sounds like a thud, like when an ornery steer rams the side of a barn, only much, much bigger, reverberating through his very bones. He freezes like a deer for half a second before shoving everything he owns into his backpack and bolts for the door. There's a second rumble, and a low boom. The entire building shakes. Clint covers his head with both hands as he runs, and a particularly violent rattle throws him headfirst into the stairway.

He hits the wall and slides down into the corner and stays put. Chunks of concrete rain down, and something heavy hits him in the shoulder. There's a piercing, rending crash, and suddenly it's a lot brighter.

The shaking stops. Clint uncovers his head warily, clapping a hand over his mouth and nose to ward off the massive plume of dust. The building now seems to be about half a building; there's a gaping hole where the ceiling used to be, and the rest of the floor Clint was just on drops away to a massive pile of rubble. The air is too choked with debris to breathe, so Clint tears one of the sleeves off his shirt and rips it open to make a mask, winding it around the bottom half of his face.

He doesn't doubt that the Gamemakers orchestrated the collapse of this building, drawing in hunters to track a wounded prey. His options now are hide from the tributes who inevitably come to investigate, or rabbit and hope he isn't seen out in the open.

He chooses the latter.

The top of his stairwell is intact, mostly, so he vaults over the railing, dropping through floor by floor as quickly as possible. By the third floor, however, there's so much rubble and debris that the stairwell's filled up like pebbles in a bottle. He ventures out into the broken hallway instead. He stops just inside the still-standing wall to check the surrounding forest, but he doesn't see any movement and he's not willing to wait too long to double check. He clatters his way down the debris, slipping and sliding as it moves beneath him.

Some preternatural instinct throws him down. A javelin whistles past where his head would have been. Clint throws a wild glance over his shoulder to see three of the Career pack charging out of the bushes. Behind them, Javelynn's winding up with a second projectile.

Clint flees down the opposite side of the debris pile. There's a deep scratch on his bare arm, but it's barely bleeding and Clint doesn't have time to do anything about it as he crashes into the forest.

In the end, they tree him like a raccoon. Clint doesn't have the speed or endurance to outrun trained, not-hungry tributes, and his prey instinct drives up up the tallest tree he can find. It's not an easy tree to climb - the lowest branches are a good fifteen feet off the ground - but Clint's used to that and his fingers are strong enough to grip the bark around the sides of the trunk and haul himself up.

This sucks. Clint peers down at the four as they jog into the clearing around his tree, self-assured now that their prey is trapped.

"Get him down, Jav," says Baron imperiously.

Clint thinks she might roll her eyes. "I can't hit him from here, idiot," she retorts scornfully. "There's too many branches in the way."

"What good are you even?" mutters Gene. "We should have brought Buck instead. Or not. You Twos are way too hyped."

"At least my district can use more than just fishing spears," Javelynn snaps. There's a brace of javelins strapped to her back and what looks like a combat knife and a machete at her waist. "You throw that thing even once and you're useless."

"You don't throw a fishing spear," says Gene, with the air of someone who has said this many times already.

"Someone needs to get him down," Lotus interjects.

Simultaneously, all four look up at Clint.

"Uh," says Clint, not relinquishing his death grip on the tree trunk. "So, this is awkward."

Gene rolls his eyes. "A mouthy one," he grumbles.

"You don't seem very afraid," Lotus observes, tilting her head as she watches Clint.

This is true. Minus the one blip after the Reaping, Clint's been eerily calm about this whole thing. He shrugs as best he can. "Everyone dies."

"You ran," she points out.

"I don't _want_ to die."

Lotus nods thoughtfully. "Come down now and I will make it clean for you," she offers.

"Lotus!" complains Gene, looking disgruntled.

That's a pretty good offer in the Games, coming from a Career. Clint isn't naive enough to trust her, though. "No can do," he says regretfully. "But thanks," he adds, because he's not a complete savage.

"We _will_ kill you," Lotus warns. "The longer we wait, the longer we will take."

That sends a real thrill of fear down Clint's spine. He shivers. "I'll pass," he says.

Lotus shrugs, with that casual elegance the Capitol loves about her. "Suit yourself," she says, and turns away deliberately. "He'll have to come down eventually," she says to the others.

"Fine," says Baron. "You two, stay here and guard him. Lotus and I'll double back to that building."

"Ugh," Gene grouses.

Javelynn rolls her eyes. "Whatever," she says. "I could use a lunch break."

Clint's reminded of his own hollow stomach as the two Career pairs split off. But he's not going anywhere soon and he's still only got the one bag of nuts so he pulls out a knife and his project and gets to it.

Lotus and Baron have come back. The Careers are not eager to leave a treed prey, but from the cannon Clint hears, they've caught another, and their bloodlust is sated for now. They've made camp under his tree, but other than checking that he's still here, they've left him alone.

Clint hooks the cord over his body and leans against it carefully. If it's time they're giving him, he'll use it.

The next day, it's Gene and Javelynn who go. Clint wonders where the last Career is. Maybe Buck is back at the Cornucopia, guarding the supplies. But that's a vulnerable position, even for someone good at fighting. If there's another alliance, even among the weaker tributes, they could overwhelm him easily.

Not that, you know, Clint's in a position to do anything about that.

There are two more cannons before Clint is ready to make his move. Baron and Lotus are gone, today, leaving just Gene and Javelynn lounging about below, sharpening their weapons and throwing pointed barbs at each other. It's a stupid move, and he's going to die painfully for it, but he's going to do it because he doesn't care anymore. He's going to take as many down with him as possible.

That way, Nat will know he went down fighting. Without regrets.

He reaches back for an arrow.

Breathe in, breathe out. He draws back the string.

Hiss-thunk. A cannon fires.

"Holy shit!" Gene yelps, but they've grown too complacent, knowing Clint can't leave, and now Javelynn is sprawled bonelessly at the base of his tree because Clint never misses. Well, he'd been going for her eye, but the arrow's buried in her forehead. He needs a little time to get used to his rush-job bow.

Gene's on his feet, but Clint, even twenty feet up in the air, has him in his sights. The District Four tribute only has a couple of spears, and as he'd spent the last two days telling Javelynn, _he_ won't be throwing anything at Clint. A second arrow; the teen goes down. The cannon fires.

The smart thing to do now would be to stay up here until Baron and Lotus come back and then pick them off from his sniper's perch. But Clint isn't exactly playing not to lose, and he isn't exactly playing to win either. And he's just so frickin' hungry. He'd eaten the last of his nuts the night before, accidentally binging them between shaving down his bow, and he knows for a fact that Gene has an entire roasted rabbit wrapped in plastic in his backpack.

He slings the bow back over his head, grabs his stuff, and shimmies down the tree. He grabs Gene's backpack, Javelynn' fantastic serrated combat knife, retrieves his arrows, and books it out of there.

An hour later, Clint deeply, deeply regrets what he's done.

Why?

There are tiny, sharp-fanged apex predators chasing him through the forest, and they definitely were not here the first time Clint was in this neck of the woods.

One ricochets off a tree and comes screaming at his face in a bundle of fur, fangs, and claws. Clint bites down a yelp and bats it aside with his bow without breaking pace. Is this punishment, for evading the Careers? Are the Gamemakers trying to herd him somewhere?

Clint doesn't know and he doesn't have time to figure out.

Razor sharp teeth latch in his calf, and he stumbles. The pack is on him in a flurry of feline yowls.

Clint yanks Javelynn's knife out of his waistband and slashes it through a furry body. Red-hot strips open up along his arms, in his shoulder, all down his legs even as he swats and swipes at them.

He slams his entire body against the ground, feels the crunch of small bones, and the mutts scatter, vanishing back into the trees as quickly as they'd come.

He lays there for half a minute, panting, then rolls over. Lines of fire burn all over, but Clint knows this attack wasn't meant to kill. It was meant to cripple. He won't get the luxury of a quick death.

Can you eat mutt? Clint doesn't know, but he picks up the two catlike mutts sprawled broken on the ground and ties them to the back of his pack. Then he limps his way out, zigzagging aimlessly through the trees.

He's tired.

Clint's leery of those buildings now that one's literally fallen on him, so when he finds a little hollow nestled in the roots of a tree, shrouded by bushes, he crawls down and huddles in on himself. It's dusk now, and he's fended off two more attacks by the little cat-mutts. None of the claw-marks or bites are too deep, but they burn and sting and throb whether he's moving around or not.

Maybe it wouldn't be a terrible thing if he fell on his own knife.

There's an almost imperceptible shift of leaves, barely distinguishable from the branches that crinkle in the wind.

The bow and an arrow are in his hands in a flash, but it's not the mutts this time. He lowers the bow slightly. "It'd be smart of you to stay away," he calls lowly. "I got a giant target on my back."

"I know," says Penny dryly, slipping out from between the trees.

Clint eyes her wearily.

She turns back the way she came. "He's safe," she tells someone.

"Am not," Clint argues, but he's too tired to really care.

A girl, somewhere between Clint's thirteen and Penny's sixteen, steps forward timidly.

Clint gives her a once-over. "I remember you, Golden Girl," he says.

District 5's Gwendolyne ducks her head. In her utilitarian tribute uniform, she's a far cry from the gold-dusted little sprite with the glowing dress that lit up the opening parade.

"Clint's good people," Penny tells the girl.

"Clint's dead people," Clint retorts, wincing as he sits up.

Penny shoots him a glare. "Natasha said you should keep me alive," she informs him.

Clint feels his eyebrows rise. Natasha did, did she? "I have a mutt pack and a Career pack after me," he says. "Pretty sure staying away from me will keep you alive. Besides," he points out, "I'm pretty sure Romanova only told you to stick by me so you can kill me later."

"Let me see those," says Penny. Clint swats ineffectually at her as she crouches down to examine his numerous cuts.

"I have water," Gwendolyne offers, digging through her pack.

"Save it," says Clint. "It's wasted on me."

Both girls ignore him, and in the end it's easier to let them bandage him up.

"What's with your bow?" asks Penny, giving it a once-over. "Pretty shoddy work for the Capitol, isn't it?"

"I made this," Cling says defensively, hugging it to his side. "It shoots fine. Took down a coupla Careers this morning."

Gwendolyne squeaks. "You what?"

"You made that?" says Penny incredulously.

"Yeah. They ran me up a tree," Clint defends. "I didn't have a choice."

"You can definitely keep us alive," Penny decides.

For the who-knows-how-many-th time, Clint gives up. It's becoming a late-life habit he's not particularly fond of. Nothing to do now but he doesn't get them killed too gruesomely.

They watch the skies together that night as the anthem overtures play.

"We should hole up in one of those old buildings," Penny suggests. "There's only ten of us left, and only three of them are Careers. They can't trap us in if we know they're coming."

"One of them alone could probably kill two of us," Clint points out. "Also, an entire building straight up fell on me a couple days ago."

"Really?" says Gwendolyne, eyes wide.

"So that's what that noise was," Penny says thoughtfully. "There's a bit of forest that completely collapsed - I think there was a tunnel or cave or something underneath - but we ran so we didn't get caught in that. I didn't think they'd take the _buildings_ down."

"Go big or go home," Clint mutters. "They dropped one, they could probably drop the others. Guess it's just a matter of if they want to." He pauses. "But sure, let's go," he says.

Penny eyes him suspiciously. "Are you being sarcastic right now?"

"No," says Clint. "Mostly no," he amends. "I feel safer when I've got a good vantage point. Can see people coming. Besides, we'll probably be dead by the end of the week, so why not?"

Penny scowls thunderously.

"Okay," says Gwendolyne. "I'm in.

Clint's gotten a little turned around wandering through the arena, but he's pretty sure the building they choose - eight stories, bracketed by a cluster of shorter buildings - is a couple kilometers out from the Cornucopia, but on the opposite side of the one that'd collapsed on him. He can see the horn glinting in the distance when he climbs out onto the roof, just beyond the wheel-structure.

Now that there's three of them, not only are they a much larger target, they can also switch off watch shifts. Despite being bandaged nearly head to toe, Clint gets the best sleep he's gotten since being dropped in the arena. At dawn, Penny wakes him up, and he takes the last shift lying on his stomach at the roof's edge with his head propped on his arms and bow in easy reach. When the sun's high, he goes down and wakes the others and they share the rest of Gene's roasted rabbit.

At midday, there's another cannon. Gwendolynne jumps. Clint and Penny exchange glances.

Time is running out.

When Clint goes down to refill their water bottles, leaving the girls behind with a couple of his knives, he finds that the river is merely a trickle. Before he can finish filling the bottles, it ebbs entirely, leaving only damp riverbed behind.

He goes back with one and a half bottles of water.

Clint spends the day watching the forest with a hawk's eye. Gwendolyne and Penny go out to forage as he keeps watch from the one of the rooms. His range of view is more limited here, but if he stays still, it's more difficult from someone to look in and see him too.

There's a gentle breeze playing across the treetops, and if Clint were to close his eyes, he could almost believe he was home, in the pastures outside 10 with the Red Room's sheep. It's the autumn lambing season, just about, and the early ones should be dropping pretty soon. Merrybelle for sure; her sides had been so swollen, she must have bred not long after the other ewes lambed in spring.

Clint's gaze catches a flicker of movement within the trees. His eyes go to it instantly even as he flattens himself against the inside wall. It's not Gwendolyne or Penny - the figure is much too tall and broad. He focuses in - it's Kazi, the District 9 tribute.

Slowly, Clint reaches back for an arrow, but hesitates.

Killing Gene and Javelynn - that was self defense. They were actively (okay, passively) trying to kill him, and attacking first was the only way he could get away cleanly. But this? Kazi's not doing anything to him - yet - and for all Clint knows, he's just trying to survive quietly until the end. If Clint fires this arrow, he's a murderer, plain and simple. And Clint isn't even trying to get out of this alive.

Is it worth it? Killing this other boy, making it easier for the Careers to cinch a win?

But Clint's not in this alone, not anymore. He doesn't know exactly where Gwendolyne and Penny are, but if Kazi runs into them and and uses that brutal-looking scythe on them - well, that's on Clint. He glances out the window again.

This is his call.

He pulls back the arrow.

Gwendolyne comes flying in, face pale and pack bouncing on her back, Penny just a few steps behind, knife up in a backhanded grip Clint recognizes from Nat. "Did you see anything?" she demands. "We heard the cannon - "

Clint meets her eyes. "No," he says. "I didn't see anything."

One small rabbit is not enough to feed three of them, especially when they spend so much energy running around in the forest, and they finished it hours ago. Clint roots around in his bag for the upteenth time, but just like the last dozen times he's checked it, there's no food. They'd eaten the mutts the night before, smoked in a hollow log to hide the smoke; there'd been startlingly little meat under the thick pelts.

Gwendolyne's watching him. "I think they're trying to drive us back towards the Cornucopia," she says. "All the animals are gone. I found some berries this afternoon, but that's it."

Clint heaves a sigh. "I guess we have no choice, then," he says. "We'll have to try and steal some from the Careers tomorrow."

It seems Clint has picked up another late-life habit: stupid plans. Clint does not appreciate this character development.

"I don't think that's going to keep us alive longer," Penny says dubiously. "It sounds like we'll die faster. And more painfully."

"I can't really fight," Gwendolyne adds.

"Don't worry, Golden Girl," says Clint. "You have me. I'll get you that food if it's the last thing I do."

Because to hell with it. Clint may as well go out with a bang. He tells them so.

Penny frowns. "That's not funny, Clint."

Clint's grand plan, in the end, amounts to 'hike back to the Cornucopia without running into anyone and figure it out from there,' so he does kind of see why Penny and Gwendolyne are concerned. But he reckons his eyes are about as sharp as a hawk's and his hearing isn't bad either so he's pretty confident he can pull off at least Part 1 of their plan.

"Gwenny is not going in," Penny states.

"What?" Gwendolyne demands.

"Okay," Clint agrees.

"Hang on!" protests Gwendolyne. "I want to help too!"

"No," says Penny.

"We need you to be the distraction," says Clint.

"Oh, okay," says Gwendolyne.

" _What_?" Penny snaps. "Absolutely not."

"It's dangerous either way," Clint points out. "We just need her to make a distraction from a distance to make sure the Careers clear out as much as possible. She can hide, after."

"I can do it," Gwendolyne insists. Penny still looks slightly murderous.

"Light a fire," says Clint. "And then run back to the base as fast as you can without leaving a trail. Come on, Penny, we're burning daylight."

In the forest just beyond the Cornucopia, Clint sees his luck finally starting to look up.

"Jacques?" says Clint incredulously.

The older boy waves his fingers. He looks pretty good for the Games - his cheekbones stand out more starkly, but there's no weakness in his step and a sword's slung at his waist. "Hey," he says cheerfully. "What brings you to this neck of the woods?"

Clint waves reassuringly back at Penny, who creeps forward out of the shadows but stares at Jacques silently, suspiciously. "We're about to go raid the Careers," he says. "They've got a stockpile of food at their base.

Jacques' eyebrows rise. "No shit?" he says. "I was on my way to do the same fucking thing. There's no goddamn food anywhere else."

"Wanna come with?" Clint offers. "Y'know, just until we get the food." Penny's frowning, but Clint knows that with three of them, they have a much better chance of actually pulling this off. It's 1:1 odds with him, after all, and Jacques is pretty handy with that sword.

"Hell yeah," says Jacques. "There's only one of them there now. The other two ran off somewhere. Chasing some poor sod, probably."

"Oh, yeah, we made a diversion," says Clint, buoyant now.

"What's the plan?" asks Jacques, looking out to where the Cornucopia's bulk gleams in the sunlight.

"I'll get the guard, you and Penny swipe the stuff," Clint explains. "Easy."

"How're you gonna 'get' the guard?" Jacques says dubiously.

Clint unslings his bow and waves it at the teen. "With this," he says. "I can hit anything with it.

"No shit?" says Jacques, eyeing it speculatively. "All right. Let's fucking do this." He's got one hand on the hilt of his sword.

Clint nods and turns to lead the way. They'll circle around to the mouth of the Cornucopia, hopefully catch sight of the lone guard there. One shot, no mess. Piece of cake.

"Clint!" Penny shrieks, and collides with his back.

He stumbles forward and whirls in time for something hot and wet to spray across his face and upper torso. Penny collapses at his feet.

Jacques spreads his hands faux-helplessly. There's blood dripping off the edge of his sword. Penny's blood. "Look, Clint," he says. "The Careers ask you to join them, you don't say no. I know _you_ don't give a fuck, but _I_ want to go home. No hard feelings."

Clint sees red. It's the first strong emotion he's felt since maybe the night in the barn, after Fury came home and told them he was going to the Games.

He wants to ask _why_ and _how could you_ and _how could you be so stupid_ and _they're using you_ but he can tell that Jacques believes wholeheartedly that he'll be the Victor, that he'll take down the tributes that have been training as killers since they could walk, that he'll make it out of this arena alive. He sees with sudden clarity that despite his friendly overtures and seemingly genuine interest in Clint, Jacques is willing to kill whoever gets in his way. He is, as much as can be true for a lesser District, the ideal tribute.

Clint thinks maybe this is what it means to hate.

His bow comes up and he lets fly. Jacques deflects the first off the flat of his blade, but Clint is fast and he never misses. The second arrow sprouts from the middle of Jacques' forehead and he falls back soundlessly.

Clint doesn't watch his body hit the floor even as the cannon fires in the distance. He's on his knees at Penny's side, hands hovering helplessly over the blood seeping inexorably out of the tear in her uniform. The blood is pooling beneath her, soaking into Clint's pants, but her chest's still rising and falling.

He did this. He can't fix this. He meets her eyes, anguished, and sees nothing but acceptance.

"Hey," Penny croaks, her voice a hoarse whisper. "This - this sucks."

"I'm supposed to be the one who dies first," Clint protests weakly. His vision blurs, and he swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. "You were supposed to be the one who kills me."

There's blood bubbling out of Penny's mouth and she's visibly struggling to breathe. Her chest shudders as she smiles. "Sorry," she wheezes, "for being selfish. I - " she chokes. "Never - never wanted to - make it out - anyways." Her eyes are old and tired and overwhelmingly calm. "Being in this - this hell has been - the best week of - of my life," she rasps. "Better - better than the hell I came from."

Clint wants to beg her to save her breath, to hold on, but he's no stranger to death and he knows she's not walking away from this. She doesn't even want to. There's something terrible in his chest, ripping away until he can barely breathe from the agony. He reaches down to grasp her hand, and she clutches him back desperately.

"It hurts," she confesses, still smiling.

"May your suffering end," he tells her, tongue fumbling over the traditional words, "and may your soul find rest."

It takes an eternity for her cannon to fire.

"Penny didn't make it," says Clint.

"I didn't get the food," says Clint.

"I'm sorry," says Clint.

And Clint looks at Gwendolyne and sees the same acceptance he saw on Penny's face.

The crazy thing is, Gwendolyne doesn't want to leave. She doesn't want to kill Clint, at least not yet, though she's kept the knives he gave her. Even though he got Penny killed, she stays in their barren room and keeps watch while he sleeps.

At midday, he's woken by a cannon that presumably leaves him and her with three Careers in the top five of the Twenty-sixth Hunger Games.

Hell if he isn't going to take them all down with him as he goes. He's dead certain that Gwendolyne's the only person left who deserves to walk out of this alive.

He unwraps all his soiled bandages and eats the berries she offers and leaves as the light fades from the sky.

Nighttime is hunting time, after all.

Clint strikes out for the weird wheel near the Cornucopia. He prefers to be at a distance, and the wheel'll give him good cover while facing the mouth of the horn.

He moves cautiously but purposefully and gets his back to a metal support. He sets an arrow to the string and carefully peers towards the Cornucopia.

It's abandoned. The inside is empty.

Clint is completely beyond panic. He's not even capable of panic anymore. He slides behind into the shadow of the wheel, shrouded by metal and stands completely still. His eyes dart among the trees. He waits.

He waits.

He waits.

The night breeze ruffles his hair, tugging at the scabbed-over cuts that crisscross his body. The false? moon creeps ever higher in the sky.

His patience pays off. Deep in the forest, there is movement. He tracks it, making out a swinging arm, a leg, then a head as Baron moves through the trees. Clint's too far to see him entirely, but he doesn't need to. He draws back his arrow and brings his bow up in one smooth movement.

He breathes. In, out. A flash of Baron's shoulder. His torso and waist. An arm. His head.

Clint fires.

The second his bowstring twangs in his ear, Clint knows it's good.

The boom of the cannon nearly masks the almost soundless footstep behind him. He whips around, fingers reaching instinctively for a second arrow.

"So," says Lotus, not three meters away. The tip of her naginata is pointed unwaveringly at him. "You're a fighter after all."

Clint narrows his eyes at her down the shaft of his arrow. "Guess so," he says.

She nods thoughtfully, her weapon still held deceptively low. "May the odds be ever in your favor," she says, "and may the better tribute win."

Clint looses the arrow, but she's fast enough to throw herself out of the way in a tight twist, and the long staff of her weapon whirls in her grasp as she charges Clint. His next arrow nicks her ear as she ducks aside, and then he has no more time for arrows.

He tosses aside his bow and fumbles for his knives, throwing himself behind the metal pole, and her blade collides with it with a loud clang. He scrambles to keep the pole between him and her, but she whirls around it with indolent grace, slashing the naginata's blade at his midsection with cold precision.

He gets his blades up to catch the brunt of the blow, but the angle's bad and he cries out as the naginata bites into his side. One of his knives drops from nerveless fingers as his wrist is wrenched backwards, and he again yelps involuntarily.

Lotus yanks her blade back and stabs, but Clint batters it aside with his remaining knife. His breath is coming in harsh pants. He's so far outclassed here he may as well be bobbing in a lake as she takes potshots at him.

She swipes the blade at his head and he ducks, but she swings the butt of the staff around faster than he expects. It slams into his head and his head slams into the metal pole and he sees black and white explode across his vision simultaneously. He stumbles, dropping to his knees, and vaguely registers something whirling just over his head. There's a high pitched ringing hammering into his ears and it's the only thing he hears even as he watches Lotus' blade collide with the pole again.

He rolls aside and staggers upright and only by holding the knife in both hands is he able to block her follow-up swipe. It glances off the knife still, and bites into his shoulder. He thinks he yells, then.

Lotus disengages, lightning-fast, and slashes for his neck. He ducks, dropping to the ground in a low crouch, and hurls his knife in an awkward forehand lob.

She falls soundlessly, noiselessly, and even when she hits the ground Clint doesn't hear a thing.

He sways, slides down until he's lying crumpled on his side, exhausted, and stares into her eyes. Even in death, despite the hilt protruding from her chest, Lotus's eyes are calm, her face completely serene. There's no anger there, no hate, no relief, and strangely, that comforts Clint.

Clint closes his eyes with a sigh he feels but doesn't hear. He's done.

He forces his eyes back open. He's not done. Not yet.

He pulls himself to his feet with effort and staggers back to the wheel. His hands are blood-slick as he grabs his bow. Fumbles it up his arm to the crook of his elbow.

He's running on animal instinct now, even as he feels his life throbbing out of the wound in his side with every beat of his heart. It's fine. Just a little longer.

Just a little longer.

He drops his backpack, unbuckles it and lets it slide off. He doesn't need that now. He just needs his bow and his arrows and a little more time.

Go high, say his instincts. Yes, he needs a vantage point. He needs to see it to shoot it.

It. That's…

What is that?

Buck. He remembers Buck. Teenager. Brown hair. Took Clint's bow.

Clint finds himself halfway up the wheel. His breathing is coming in painful, stuttered pants. The pain from his wounds are threatening to white out his brain.

No. This isn't enough. He needs to be higher.

He loses time.

He's in this little bucket thing. He doesn't know what this is. But there's little benches and he's on the metal floor of the thing.

He reaches out a shaky hand and drags himself up on a bench, half-slumped against the side. He leaves a puddle of blood where he was laying. There's streaks along the side where he must have hauled himself in.

 _Look_. He needs to look.

Clint looks.

He's got the bird's-eye view from here. The arena yawns out in front of him. The Cornucopia must be behind him; he doesn't remember. There's the cluster of buildings he and Gwendolyne and Penny -

He shuts down that train of thought.

The trees are thin, between here and there, on the little trail towards the Cornucopia that Clint skirted the first day, when he was running. Clint squints, even though his vision is perfect.

There's a tiny black head bobbing its way down that path.

No. Clint told her to stay.

Or did he?

He doesn't remember.

But it's not safe.

Buck's got a bow. It's not safe.

Where is he?

If she's out there, if she left, then…

Clint angles his head towards the building.

In a window, next to where Clint'd set up camp with Gwendolyne, there's a dark figure. That bow is in his hand, and he's watching Gwendolyne run.

Clint can't let that happen.

His bow's slipping in his grip. Between the pain in his shoulder and abdomen and head it takes him three tries to grab an arrow. He gets it on the string, at last, and lets the familiar movements take over.

He chokes back a pained gasp as he pulls it back, his body straining to keep the arrow drawn.

He sights down the arrow.

Buck's set his shoulders and his own bow is up. Time. Clint's running out of time.

Clint's vision whites out. No. No, just a little longer. His vision swims back in, but it's fuzzy. He can only just make out where Buck's head must be. Clint adjusts the tilt of his arrow. Inhales, exhales. Releases.

The bow drops from his fingers, tipping out of his hands and down, down, to the ground below and he falls backwards onto the bench. He doesn't hear the cannon - can't hear the cannon - but even without seeing the arrow, he knows what he hit. Clint never misses.

And Clint - Clint feels an overwhelming relief. He's done. He's finished. It's over.

"You go, Golden Girl," Clint mutters woozily. The darkness takes him.

It would have been nice to see the sky one last time.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Hell is white.

Or is it heaven?

No. Clint remembers Kazi and Gene and Javelynne and Baron and Buck and Jacques and Lotus and Penny. There's no way he's in heaven after all that.

Hell it is.

Clint wonders if this is what it's like to be born. Heavy-limbed, weak. He can't hear a thing. Maybe he's been born deaf in this life.

He blinks heavy eyelids.

He opens them again, and Fury is staring down at him. "Oh god," mumbles Clint. "Why are you in my hell?"

"Because Natasha pissed off the Capitol more than we thought," growls Fury. His voice sounds fuzzy and distant.

Clint considers this. Is that something that would land Fury in Clint's hell? Probably. That sounds reasonable. "Okay," he says, and closes his eyes again.

The next time Clint wakes up, he's got a dawning feeling that something's wrong.

Namely, it's the Avox boy.

Clint is fairly certain there are no silent servers in hell. "What's happening?" he asks. He can barely hear his own voice. He doesn't especially expect an answer. Maybe that's a little insensitive. He's not supposed to talk to him.

Fury's back, and the sinking feeling in his gut intensifies

"I died," says Clint.

"Briefly," Fury says.

Clint digests this. It's hard to breathe again, suddenly. "Gwendolyne Sabuki was the winner of the 26th Hunger Games," he says.

"Gwendolyne Sabuki was killed by Buck Chisholm," says Fury mercilessly. "The 22nd tribute to die. You are the winner of the 26th Hunger Games."

Oh.

Fuck.

Fury says nothing as Clint's eyes burn. He focuses on taking shallow breaths, but he chokes. He sobs helplessly, fisting his hands in the spotless white sheets and dragging them up to cover his face.

Just another broken promise. Just another dead girl.

Clint wants to stay there forever, in this pure white room that's forever suspended in time - a purgatory before the real plunge into hell.

That's the only thing waiting for him. Fury makes that clear.

But that would never be allowed. The Games must have its Victor.

Clint eats when he's told and sleeps when he isn't and puts on the clothes they tell him to wear.

At his coronation ceremony, he stares unseeingly at the screen. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't cry. He doesn't feel.

"Congratulations, Clint," says the President. "That was a very close game. You must be grateful." That one innocuous statement is laden with unspoken meaning. A threat. A promise.

Clint meets the President's eyes. "Yessir," he says.

On the train back to 10, Fury pulls him into a private compartment.

There's a bed, a table, two chairs, and Nat.

Clint stops short.

Fury gives him a little nudge in the back. "Sit," he orders.

Clint sits.

Nat sits across from him. They look at each other.

Promises broken. He thinks of Penny, lying broken on the floor, smiling as she bled out. How Nat poured her time and soul into making the older girl strong, so she'd survive. To give him the mercy of a quick death - their best case scenario. But he went and messed it up and he's alive and she isn't.

He's made Nat vulnerable, by living. He knows that now that he's made it out of the Arena alive, he's her leverage. And he knows that with him to threaten, the Capitol will keep her in line.

Clint looks away first, as always. "Sorry," he rasps.

"Don't," says Nat, and like always, she knows exactly what he's apologizing for. Then, "She never wanted to come back."

There's a million things Clint thinks he can say to that, but the words catch in his throat. He shakes his head wordlessly.

"Clint," Nat says deliberately, but he can't meet her eyes. "You're home."

Clint takes a shuddering breath.

Clint spends a lot of time on the couch. His couch - in Nat's house. He has his own house now, too, but it will never feel like home.

He sleeps. It's easier, sleeping. There are no jumbled thoughts swirling around, hammering him from all sides when he sees a kitchen knife or bowl of berries or even his reflection in the mirror.

Nat and Fury move around him in the house, like water flowing over rocks. Sometimes one of them pushes a bowl of food into his hands, and he'll eat maybe half of it, on autopilot. He's not really hungry these days. Sometimes they talk to him but he lets that wash over him too, hearing the words and brushing past them.

There are the ghosts, in his dreams, but he deserves those.

One day, there's a knock on the door. Clint ignores it, in that drowsy, half-asleep state he finds himself floating in a lot these days. Nat pads past him on silent feet and opens it.

Clint blinks, long and slow, and tries to ignore Gwendolyne's accusing stare from behind his eyelids. He opens his eyes, and his brother is there.

Barney is scuffed, scruffy, and his eyes are impossibly soft. "Hey, baby bro," he says.

Clint surfaces as if from molasses. "You can't be here," he says, voice rising as he panics. "They'll use you, they'll hurt you - "

Barney slides down onto the spot Clint vacates as he sits up. "This is my job," he says gruffly, grabbing Clint with a firm hand on the side of his neck and pulling him down to his shoulder. "I'm fine. You're fine. Jus' shuddup, will ya?"

Clint closes his eyes and shudders, and thankfully Barney doesn't say anything when Clint soaks his shirt in tears and snot. "I killed them," Clint confesses, as if his older brother hadn't just watched him murder six people on live television.

"I know," says Barney.

"I _killed them_ ," Clint repeats.

"Jesus, kid," says his brother, and manhandles him until they're eye to eye, foreheads touching. "You did what ya had to do. I wouldn'ta cared if y'had to kill _me_ to get outta there."

Clint hiccups, and Barney pushes him back against the couch. "Where's the towels, christ," says Barney, and stumps off to find something to mop Clint up with.

Clint remembers those first days when Nat came home. The way she acted like a ghost, those first haunting visits to town. From a distance, he notes that on the other side, it's all very numb.

The sheep have lambed for the autumn. Nat tows him by the wrist to visit the pastures, where Merrybelle browses lazily with a wobbly-legged little shadow frolicking at her heels. He inhales, and the smell of wool and grass and sheep dung grounds him.

Nat gives him a searching stare. "Better?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, tangling his fingers in Sugarberry's fleece. He's not well. He knows this. But better he can do.

It's an old routine, and Clint picks it back up intermittently, in stops and starts. But the fields and the sheep have always been his solace, so day by day he looks forward to seeing the flock. Nat's with him always, in that silent, careful manner of her. When they pass through town, she puts her slight body between him and any Peacekeepers, like she could shield him from their scrutiny.

Clint doesn't mind. He can't bring himself to care. He doesn't seem to mind much, these days.

One day, on the way to the fields, he hears a whine and a thump and a pained yelp.

He veers abruptly off that same path he takes every day, and despite her surprise, Nat is hard on his heels.

It's a mutt, sort of brownish, and it's cowering in the corner of the baker's yard. The man himself is winding up to kick the dog again, but Clint pushes his way into the yard. "Stop," he says.

The baker whirls, face flushed in anger and exertion, then catches sight of the pair and the blood promptly flees from his face. "Mutt - mutt's stealin' - " he begins.

"He said 'stop,'" says Nat in her casually menacing voice, the one she uses when she's Natalia Romanova, Victor of the first Quarter Quell, and the man subsides. "Leave."

It's an incredibly ugly mutt with chewed-up ears and a broken tail and only one eye. It wags its tail hesitantly when Clint crouches, and with a bit of meat he's convinced it to hop into his arms. He carries it back to Nat's house, ignoring her when she wrinkles her nose delicately before letting them in.

"Bathtub," she orders, and Clint takes the dog into the bathroom obediently.

The brownish dog turns out to be kind of yellowish, actually. "You're lucky you have a tail at all," Clint tells him, and the dog wags said tail enthusiastically in agreement.

A shadow darkens the doorway. Clint's hand jerks on the bottle of shampoo as he whirls, but it's just Fury, looming in the doorframe the way he looms over everything and everyone. "That's an ugly-ass dog," is what he says.

Clint glances between the dog, who is thoroughly soaking Clint as he holds him back from jumping out of the tub to go greet Fury, and the man himself. "I dunno, sir," he says. "He's only got the one eye. He kinda looks like you."

To his everlasting shock, the man laughs. "Get your ass downstairs for dinner when you're done, Barton," he orders. "And give that poor mutt a name."

That night, he's lying in Nat's overlarge bed with her back against his and his stomach full of Fury's cooking, and he thinks maybe this is how he finds his peace.

"Better?" asks Nat.

"Yeah," says Clint, tucking Lucky more securely to his side. "This is good."

* * *

 **A/N:** **I've been planning this for ages but I never got around to it. I actually wrote a couple thousand words on it immediately after finishing MYSE and then I promptly killed my laptop and lost the file. And that is why I now write on Google docs.**

 **So this year I pulled up my old notes and went, hey, why don't I write that sequel for the 2nd year anniversary? and then I promptly forgot about it until last weekend, when I panicked and put my current project (Rise) on hold so I could crank out these 15k words.**

 **In the future (3rd year anniversary? heh) I may write an actual sequel as the next installment in a series instead of just a new chapter, so I'm marking this finished as soon as I write the epilogue. Warning though - if you want the happy ending, just stop reading here, because the epilogue is NOT NECESSARY and sets up for future stories and is definitely less of a somewhat happy ending.**


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